On the event of our first day of rehearsal, I would like to engage the cast and crew in walking tour of Bryn Mawr college, a women’s liberal arts college close to Villanova in Bryn Mawr, PA. Bryn Mawr was founded in 1885 and is one of the historic Seven Sisters colleges. The Seven Sisters includes a group of seven highly selective and prestigious academic institutions, historically women’s colleges: Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Radcliffe College, Smith College, Vassar College, and Wellesley College. The Seven Sisters designation was based off the colleges’ affiliations with their Ivy League male-college counterparts. The phrase “Seven Sisters” is a reference to the Greek myth of The Pleiades, specifically the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the nymph Pleione. The Pleiades are also a small collection of stars in the constellation Taurus. I find this to be all the more relevant, given the ties to Greek mythology referenced in Fefu and Her Friends.

 

From its founding, Bryn Mawr offered both undergraduate and graduate education and was the first women’s college to offer the Ph.D. The women in Fefu and Her Friends are all in academia during a time when women generally were not expected to attend college, unless they explicitly desired to receive a higher education. What might it feel like to walk on campus grounds which have historically prioritized the education of women? Further, what might it feel like to read Fefu and Her Friends aloud on these same grounds? I would propose that the first read of this play take place outside in The Cloisters, an outdoor courtyard in the center of the Old Library. Not only does the setting feel apt to the subject of the play, but it is a beautiful area that is often used as an outdoor theatrical performance space. Fefu is a play that blurs the lines of external and internal and which has brilliant implications of spatial dramaturgy. Given that spatial dramaturgy will be a central focus of the concept of this production, it feels right to employ this from the outset.