Fefu and Her Friends
| Fefu and Her Friends | |
|---|---|
| Written by | María Irene Fornés |
| Date premiered | May 5, 1977 |
| Place premiered | Relativity Media Lab, New York City, New York, United States |
Fefu and Her Friends was the fourteenth play by Cuban American playwright María Irene Fornés, originally written and produced in 1977. It is known for its alternative staging and use of a solely female cast.
Fefu and her Friends is set in New England in the spring of 1935. The story takes the audience through an entire day beginning in the noon and ending in the evening; it climaxes in a murder scene.
The play is split into three parts. It begins in the living room of Fefu's country house. Part 2 is set in four different areas of the house: the lawn, the study, the bedroom, and the kitchen. Fornés deconstructs the familiar stage, removing the fourth wall, and scenes are played in multiple locations simultaneously throughout the theater. The audience is divided into groups to watch each scene, then they rotate to the next set, as the scene is repeated until each group has seen all four scenes.
Fefu and her seven female friends gather at Fefu's house to rehearse a presentation for their charity toward school education. Each character plays a role in this event. Before and after their rehearsal, the women interact with one another, and with male characters, and share their thoughts and feelings about life along with their personal struggles and societal concerns. Fornés portrays these characters as real women, in a shift in her play-writing style to realism and naturalism in settings, characters and situations.
The characters in the play are:
The majority of the triggers begin with Fefu in her desire to express control over her friends. Her use of the gun and her overall organization of the rehearsal for the play places the other characters in positions of submission. Fefu has two sides according to Kelda Lynn Jordan- the controlling trait and the motherly trait. Fefu also criticizes herself and women in the play as being lesser than men, which also shows her preference for male traits. Jordan also comments on the meek stereotypical weakness of the other characters such as Paula, Sue, Christina, and Cindy. The only woman who stands against Fefu is Julia and this makes Fefu more aggressive toward her, leading her to kill the rabbit that symbolizes her loss of power and control. The actions of the play demonstrate the daily power struggles of women in a society that is dominated by men. According to Robert Wilson, Fefu and her Friends, “challenges our preconceptions of life” and that Julia’s final wound in the end is “our own.”
Fefu and Her Friends is recognized as a feminist play for its all-female cast, central ideas of gender roles, and its bold deviations from conventional stage presentation and audience involvement. Fornés divides the stage into a kitchen, bedroom, study, and lawn, and a short scene in each area is acted out with a fourth of the audience closely viewing each part. The groups of spectators rotate until they have seen all four scenes. These individual scenes highlight conflict in all of the women's lives and thus illustrate a more communal feminist struggle than "the typical feminist approach of the early days of the second wave of the movement which emphasized the existence and the rights of the individual woman."
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