The pleasures and pressures of friendship among women is perhaps the major theme that Maria Irene Fornés explores in her 1977 play Fefu and Her Friends. There are others—gender roles, sexuality, and alienation, to mention several more—but essentially it is an inventive drama that studies various sorts of relationships between women.
Produced and presented by Theatre for a New Audience at its Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where the revival opened tonight, Fefu and Her Friends is an absorbing and thoughtful, if somewhat enigmatic, work that is distinguished by its unorthodox structure.
Ardent students of the drama, as well as people who are interested in feminist issues, are likelier to appreciate this adventurous piece more than individuals seeking a conventional story-driven play.
Seven women have been invited by Fefu (Amelia Workman) to spend the day at her elegant house in the New England countryside. More or less in their young middle age, apparently smart and cultivated individuals, they are getting together to plan a benefit program for some charitable organization.
The play opens in a fairly straightforward manner as Fefu’s various guests arrive in her living room. Most of the women are longtime chums, former lovers in one and possibly other affiliations, while the timid Christina (Julia Canfield) is new to the group.
Then for the middle part of the play, which consists of four separate scenes, the audience is divided into four groups. Each group of viewers is ushered from their seats to watch the action unfold in four different places around the house. These scenes are performed at the same time. When the scenes conclude, each group moves over to another location and the action is repeated for them.
In this round-robin fashion, spectators observe: In the garden, Fefu and Emma (Helen Cespedes) share a game of croquet and some intimate secrets. In the study, Cindy (Jennifer Lim) tells Christina about an odd dream. In the kitchen, Sue (Ronete Levenson) stirs a pot of soup while Paula (Lindsay Rico) reflects upon the fleeting nature of love affairs. Alone in her bedroom, Julia (Brittany Bradford), an invalid due to a recent hunting accident, feverishly hallucinates about interrogation and torture.
Meanwhile, at different points during this simultaneous action, Fefu goes into other rooms to invite others to play croquet, Sue brings a bowl of soup to Julia in her bedroom, and Cecilia (Carmen Zilles) enters the kitchen to speak privately to Paula about their fizzled romance.
When the audience returns to their seats for the final section of the play, the story also returns to the living room. Among its doings, a giddy water fight erupts. And somebody mysteriously dies.
These interactions and conversations among the characters, some of it inconsequential chitchat, some of it meaningful talk regarding their relationships to each other and the world at large, is expressed in quasi-realistic dialogue. Led by Workman’s assured performance as the sardonic, secretly sorrowful Fefu, the ensemble portrays their characters naturally under the well-paced direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, who stages the tricky two-hour drama with precision.
Obviously the play is a challenge for the set designer to fulfill, but Adam Rigg smartly accommodates its needs. The living room and its adjoining foyer are conventional, nicely-furnished spaces done mostly in blues and greens. Animal and flora motifs in bric-a-brac or wallpaper can be observed there and also in the other pretty rooms of the house, three of which are situated on alternate sides of the stage.
But Julia’s bedroom is located under the stage and viewers (who wear earphones for this scene) look down through a large glass window embedded in the deck to watch the character writhe on her bed. It’s a striking, even spooky, situation that gives the impression of seeing someone buried alive.
A quietly mysterious quality pervades the play as the women, stylishly dressed by Montana Levi Blanco, spend their day together, renewing old acquaintances and forging some new ones. Although the action is set in 1935, the production’s décor and clothes merge the trends of that era with visual touches from the later 1970s, when the play was written.
Such looks subtly imply that this drama was ahead of its time. No doubt some people who see it today will think that Fefu and Her Friends still remains ahead of the times.
Fefu and Her Friends opened November 24, 2019, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs through December 8. Tickets and information: tfana.org
