Fefu and Her Friends | Production History Summary
As Fefu and Her Friends is an underproduced work, it has not received an abundance of attention from the press and there is a limited number of reviews available for professional productions. However, what is available is an abundance of scholarly theatre work and enough reviews to comb through to provide useful information in a potential production of this play. While the early response to it was relatively lukewarm and critics, save for Bonnie Marranca, seemed baffled by the concept of the play, I have some instinctual thoughts that that bafflement may have been a result of unconscious bias, elitism, or sexism. It is rare to see a group of eight people who are not men on stage at once, dealing with the realities of that state. Due to the saturation of white male critics at the time and the relatively young downtown theatre scene, I suspect that early reviews of Fefu and her Friends were affected by this.
Except for Bonnie Marranca. Bonnie Marranca’s review of the first iteration of Fefu and her Friends at the Relatively Media Lab, is an outlier. She wrote thoughtfully and admirably of the production staged in an anonymous apartment lot, and balanced both praise and criticism in her review. She observed that “the characters speak, gesture, and move in a way that serves the rhythms of the dialogue and the mood of the piece, emphasizing in quite an extraordinary way the theatricality of the text.” In this observation, I see an opportunity for our upcoming production and an aim for the process. Serving the rhythms, mood, and theatricality of this piece would be a worthy goal for any production of this piece.
In every review of Fefu and Her Friends from 1977 to today, there is an observation and recount about the experience of Part II of the play and the role of the audience. Although not explicitly a review, Scott Cummings scholarly work on Fornes recounts his experiences as a spectator at both the 1986 production at Mixed Blood Theatre and the 1992 production at Yale Repertory Theatre. In the 1986 remount of Fefu, Fornes staged the production in an aging firehouse and used every element of the internal and external architecture available to her. Environment itself served as a sort of ninth player in this production, and the stretching of these boundaries served the play well. Contrastingly, at Yale Repertory Theatre, he observed that while the actors and the creative team understood the play well, it suffered from a mechanical method of moving the audience members in Part II. He astutely observes that this may have had to do with the sheer size of the theatre itself, which seats 500 people. This is one of the pitfalls and potential drawbacks of Fefu and Her Friends. A producer will always want as many people as possible to see a production. However, it is not always in the best interest of the effectiveness of the play, and that’s worth keeping in mind. It will always be a choice in the production process and will require an assessment of values, both creative and capitalistic.
In contrast to the small number of reviews available between 1977 and 2018, there is a wealth of journalism and critical response available from the 2019 production at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, NY. As I attended and experienced this production, I can offer personal validation or criticism of the press from this production. Helen Shaw’s review in New York magazine is particularly helpful in articulating what makes the play work, and what makes the play work in present times. She points out that “to produce Fefu you need a theatre that’s willing to let the audience wander around a company able to choreography the sequences precisely.” She also identifies the risk of failing to achieve this precision and recalls a production she attended in college in which she “hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on, only that there were actresses dashing past me with soup, laughing like children.” One of the biggest challenges of this play is the rigorousness of Part II and the directorial perfection that has to be achieved in order for the play to work.
Finally, Fornes is revered as a theatre-maker and her influence is everywhere, from the site-specific play in Brooklyn loft apartment to the workshop of an incomplete play. Shaw acknowledges in her review, and while it is not identified as a pitfall, I think is worth it to consider how much Fornes’s reputation might affect the perception of a production, especially in the wake of her relatively recent passing. It is not a drawback to producing Fefu and Her Friends, however I think she makes salient points about her influence and the creative team of any given production would be wise to understand how important she is in the theatre world. The phrase “it has to be done right” might be employed, but I push back at that and offer that it has to be done with care. Part of what makes Fefu and Her Friends a special play is the potential magic and transcendence that can occur if the play is done with great amount of thought, collaboration, and consideration to every detail from blocking Scene II to set design.