Excess in Fefu

I keep returning to Emma's speech in Part 3, about environment knocking at the gateway of the senses. In Part 2, the characters find themselves in very different physical environments, and in a parallel way, very different subconscious/imaginative environments. Emma cries out that "society restricts us, school straight jackets us, civilization submerges us, privation wrings us, luxury feather-beds us." All of these images present different spaces that restrict a person's behavior and threatens to subsume their sense of the world and their sense of self. So for me, particularly in P. 2, because it's the place in the play where the environment changes most drastically for all the characters, it makes sense that these environments are so abundantly textured and diverse, that they almost overtake these women. Because in each scene the characters are almost overtaken by something from within: they are being threatened from within and without, something Julia's monologue captures really well the judges and the prayer are both something that has been imposed upon her and something that has come from her experiences. Much of the characters' language evokes this mediation between the exterior and the interior, and the loss of distinction between the two. So for the part in the play when the women are confronting these inner "demons" (that's not the right word but I'm still struggling to find it), they are also confronting these multiple interior spaces, these powerful environments that bombard them both with possibilities and dangers.

This makes me think there's more to be investigated in costumes with layers, though as Leslie pointed out nothing should be too overtly theatrical or disjointed: this play's aesthetic should be unified, with very specific interruptions. I don't have a sense that this would change the direction we've been pursuing in the lights, and it very much springs from the ideas that Greg has put forward with the set. Perhaps it means that Sean should make differentiations between the props used in each of these environments and the ones that are used in the first and third parts.

please give me books?

Books!

Hey all -

So, I need to start amassing books to have lying about in the study. I don't read about the womenfolk that often, or about the queerfolk, or the menfolk, or any kind of genderfolk(fuck?) for that matter, so if you wouldn't mind throwing out titles, I would be much obliged.

In addition, any books that strike you as 'Phillip.' Stuff like that. Cuz y'all are much more acquainted with Phillip than I am. And Fefu and this particular set of friends.

So yea. Feeding Frenzy! (and period is of no object, but cost is...)

s

Feminism

I was reading through some reviews on past production of Fefu and couldn't help but notice how all of them mentioned that it was a piece that dealt with feminism and gender politics 'in a new way'. All of them seemed to think that it was very different from the other feministic plays. With my basic knowledge of feminism, I would tend to agree, but I began to wonder what people thought of when they thought of feminism. This is kind of an open ended question and kind of just something that I'm curious about.

Personally, I think it is the way that these women relate to each other that creates a sense of an atmosphere that is innately female, one of support and relaxation in a world without males. But I think that's just one aspect of the idea and I would love to hear some other people's thoughts on feminism, both in the context of this play/their character and in life in general.

1930's Fashion

Fefu and her Friends was set in 1935 while written in the late 70's. I thought it might be interesting to compare the 1930's style of clothing with the late 70's style.

1970's Style

1930's Style

The 1930's clothing is more of a classic, docile look while the 1970's look has more of an independent, edgy flair. The morph from docile to independent (in terms of clothing) could be an example of how times have changed to push for more equal opportunities for women.

Aaaand Rubens' women

What I find interesting, when comparing these images, is that to MY eye, the kind of femininity presented seems very similar at first. The kind of bodies they have, the kind of femininity they represent. But on closer inspection it's clear that all of Rubens' women are in action of some sort, while Goya's Maja is completely passive. I think this goes back to Annie's paper excerpt, which discussed action and passivity a great deal.

Goya's Maja

These are the two different versions. One nude, one clothed. Fornes doesn't specify which might qualify as "aesthetic," but the postures are the same. ("taking in the weight of her entrails").

Cassatt

This is a great moment of a girl before she begins posturing what we might call traditional femininity. I think each of the women most likely has a moment like this one in the show.

the Colt M1911. A popular semiautomatic pistol that would have been around at the time. It's been pretty much in continuous use since 1911 (it's kinda standard law enforcement issue), also popular (and often modified) for sport.

Ice/Water

Ali commented in response to my paper that she would like to see what was in my Appendix...I'm assuming this is referring to the image I reference. (Part of our assignment was to select one image to be exemplary of our visual research). So here it is! Certainly its relationship to the play is more abstract/metaphorical than visual or compositional, but I think what drew me to it is the incredible instability and potentiality of the ice sheets--yet they are still clearly existing in some sort of enduring stasis. The violence of the ship's pathway is also certainly significant.

portraits

For Alli, Ariel, and Gedney -
Hey I just wanted to post these. This painting is the inspiration for the one portrait that Ariel and I switched on. I don't remember the title of it, but it's in the Louvre and it really caught my eyes when I saw it and I happened to remember it when I was working on the idea for that portrait.

women in water

Reading Annie's paper on Fefu, with the ending about the ideas of water and ice in the play, and also looking at the pictures Gedney posted brought to my mind the idea of synchronized swimming. First of all, typically when I think of synchronized swimming I think of women in the 20s or 30s, with their swimsuits and caps. As this play was meant to be set in that kind of time period, that was the first connection I drew. But I also began thinking about how in synch. swimming the women act as one body, all moving together to create an moving picture - beauty. Yet each swimmer has her own style that must be conformed to fit the group. And if any swimmer chooses to break the mold, the beauty can be lost to chaos. Perhaps this is carrying one metaphor too far, but with Gedney's pictures of the female posture and expression I think I will add some of swimmers. It is an ultimately feminine act that, while being extremely fluid and graceful, is at the same time forced and molded. Just a thought.
It is interesting to see these women's faces - they look pretty angry and vicious as they struggle to breathe while participating in the 'most graceful' of sports.

More photos!

This one, in a more direct way, provides a commentary on postured femininity that I think the other paintings lack. The juxtaposition with a horse (often referenced for bountiful male genitals or heightened sexual performance metaphors) while all are in white is also very telling.

Renoir: more groups in movement

These are more traditional living room/party scenes that still have a great deal of detail and movement in them. Great to look at for when we go to the large ensemble scenes and are looking to create dynamic spatial relationships between many of you onstage at once.

Degas

Notice the way Degas has given them movement in a still shot. Also the ways in which they posture their bodies when they are practicing v. when they are not I think is very interesting, particularly given Degas' own male gaze and idealization of these young girls.

Isadora Duncan Dancing

Brecht in Fefu

The text in this play has, in my mind, three kinds of text: that which is naturalistic, that which is surreal, and that which is instructive (these categories sometimes overlap). What I think I’m going to do (and I recommend all of you to do for the scenes you’re in) to go through and put brackets around the text you think is instructive and demarcate in some other way the text you find surreal. By instructive, I mean pieces of text that seem to comment on the world of the play from an almost outside perspective. It’s as if this text could be directed at the audience. Examples include:

“Fefu: [as if a god once said “and if they shall recognize each other, the world will be blown apart] p. 14

Christina: [We are made of putty. Aren’t we?] p. 18

Julia: [I feel we are constantly threatened by death, every second, every instant, it’s there. And every moment something rescues us.] p. 34

Paula: [Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies, since our material is too shocking and avant-garde, we have decided to uplift our subject matter so it’s more palatable to the sensitive public.] p. 54

Cecilia: We cannot survive in a vacuum. We must be part of a community, perhaps 10, 100, 1000. It depends on how strong you are. But even the strongest will need a dozen, three, even one who sees, thinks, and feels as he does…[Otherwise the unusual in us will perish. As we grow we feel we are strange and fear any thought that is not shared with everyone.] p. 44

Sue: [I was all bones.]

Emma: Let us, boldly, seizing the star of our intent, lift it as the lantern of our necessity, and let it shine over the darkness of our compliance. [Come! The light shines. Come! It brightens our way. Come! Don’t let its glorious light pass you by! Come! The day has come!] p. 48

Cindy: His mouth moved like the mouth of a horse. I was on an upper level with a railing and I said to him [“Stop and listen to me.”] I said it so strongly that he stopped. Everybody turned to me in admiration because I had made him stop. p. 32

I think it is important to find subtle ways to separate these moments of commentary from the rest of the text or actions that surround them. This is something for which Brecht is famous, and called it the alienation effect. In these moments, the actor breaks from the presentation of a character to prevent either an overtly theatrical interpretation of the character's sociopolitical dilemma, OR the actor speaks the text or performs an action as simply an actor, so that the audience can think of its implications beyond the world of the play.

Now, in Brecht's plays and in traditional Brechtian acting, this often means immensely theatrical shifts to draw attention both to the inherent theatricality of the play-world and to separate an actor's social commentary from the character they present. An actor turns away from her scene partner, walks downstage, and addresses the audience. Or she makes a gestus using her whole body in between two lines. In Fefu, these shifts should be distilled so that they are scarcely noticeable. It could be shift in gaze, a slight adjustment in posture, a marginal slowering or raising of the voice in volume or pitch, giving an otherwise unnatural pause before or after the moment, etc. These sorts of actions and shifts provide physicalized, performed brackets around text or moments that comment on the way the play is constructed.

Like what I mentioned above, these are not moments you will be able to foresee and plan out in advance; rather, you can begin to notice these moments in the text that fit both within the fictional world of the play as well as within the world of the audience in which the play is being performed. Looking through the script and noticing them now will make it much easier to notice and play with as we work them in person.

Psychological analysis in Fefu acting

“Like Brecht, Fornes refuses wholly to engage the language of these early plays in the seamlessness of traditional narrative–but she takes this to the point where the characters themselves seem at times to be oblivious to the ‘story’ that they are supposed to be in.”

In Annie’s paper, in these above quotations, and in that article she sent (please please read, especially the part on Fefu; it’s a very sound reading of the text) Fornes has built into the themes of this play the tension between that which is said and that which is done, which is much like Brecht’s alienation between the life of the characters in the story and how the actor’s performance can comment on it. I’m very attracted to this idea of moments in the play in which transitions take place very suddenly, for no apparent reason. Cindy begins to talk about her dream very suddenly, just as Sue suddenly starts talking about the visits to the psychiatrists office after a water fight. Fefu has a very abrupt transition with Emma, just as Emma creates a completely new scene in her performance of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Recently in rehearsal, we have been very oriented to justifying these from a psychological perspective. What I want us to seek in future rehearsals is for a different approach to many of these. Rather, these abrupt transitions are breaks from the regular rules of reality, and consequently breaks from “naturalistic” rules of acting. This doesn’t mean the transitions are all instantaneous, or that during them you break character or break the fourth wall. I think it's subtler than that, more delicate than that.

I was once told that Fornes felt that Fefu demanded something closer to cinematic acting than stage acting: smaller, more subtle. While I think this is true, I think it also is indicative of these sudden transitions in the text. It’s as if each character, each scene is a montage, and those sudden transitions are like a cut to a different angle, a different location, a different sentiment, but it’s always a cut, never a smooth glide of the camera to another image. So that rather than each character being clearly understood in one, long, continuous shot, they are fractured into different ways of being that contrast greatly with one another.

So how do we "act," how do we perform a montage within one scene, one character? Don’t fight against the absurd or unrealistic moments or text in this play by finding a naturalistic way to justify it. Instead, underline moments or lines that strike you as absurd or surreal or out of place, and pursue the absurdity in the moments when it is absurd. If your character seems to contradict herself, or if she seems to be in a dream for only one sentence and then come back to the "reality" of the scene, commit equally to the dream portion as well as to the naturalism of the conversation that surrounds it. Otherwise the whole play becomes a wash of mostly realistic scenes of women with weird word choice.

Lastly, do not think about this too hard. It will become clearer with practical use in rehearsal, so just begin to go through the text and underline those points when you notice a montage occur, or a cut in perspective. We can go from there as a team.

Fornes on Fornes

"To approach a work of art with the wish to decipher its symbolism, and to extract the author's intentions from it, is to imply that the work can be something other than what it demonstrates, that the work can be treated as a code system which, when deciphered, reveals the true content of the work. A work fo art should not be other than what it demonstrates."

I think this quotation is CRUCIAL to understanding the kind of world Fornes gives us, and why in many ways Fefu has no plot in the traditional sense. Nothing happens, save for the very end, because this is not a series of plot points to interpret. Rather, it is an encounter on several levls: An encounter of these women with each other, an encounter of each women with her fantasies and nightmares, an encounter between the audience and the actors, and an encounter between both audience and actors and the space. These encounters transform everyone: Julia can no longer walk, Fefu has shit all over her kitchen floor, Christina can barely walk she's so terrified and hurt, Paula dissolves into tears, and a series of other more subtle transformations. But this play is not a series of symbols attempting to make a point about women: it is a demonstration of 8 women who exist precariously between dream and reality, and this existence threatens to destroy them.

http://iipa.chadwyck.com/articles/displayItemPDF.do?pdfHeader=Geis%2c+Deborah+R.%2c+%3Cbi%3EWOMEN+AND%2fIN+DRAMA%3a+Wordscapes+of+the+Body%3a+Performative+Language+as+%22Gestus%22+in+Maria+Irene+Fornes%27s+Plays%3C%2fbi%3E%2c+Theatre+Journal%2c+42%3a3+p.291&id=1076-1990-042-03-000001&journalID=JID01922882&royaltiesid=LOUJID01922882&product=iipa

Here is the link again, but as a link!

This is a great article, highly recommend it.

Performative Language as Gestus

Let's hope this link works...let me know if it doesn't.

This author proposes that in Fornes' work (including Fefu) the performative text (the shown) and the dramatic text (the said) produces an effect similar to Brecht's concept of gestus. Might be interesting for the actors...

http://iipa.chadwyck.com/articles/displayItemPDF.do?pdfHeader=Geis%2c+Deborah+R.%2c+%3Cbi%3EWOMEN+AND%2fIN+DRAMA%3a+Wordscapes+of+the+Body%3a+Performative+Language+as+%22Gestus%22+in+Maria+Irene+Fornes%27s+Plays%3C%2fbi%3E%2c+Theatre+Journal%2c+42%3a3+p.291&id=1076-1990-042-03-000001&journalID=JID01922882&royaltiesid=LOUJID01922882&product=iipa

Annie's Script Analysis paper...in case you want to read it

[My final paper from Script Analysis Fall 07. I will also post hopefully most of my works cited for this.]

Dialectical Tensions in Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends

Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends’s refusal to articulate a clear political or social agenda combined with Julia’s enigmatic death at the very end of the play eliminates the possibility of a neat and tidy interpretation. Additionally, the play’s combination of Chekhovian realism with Beckettian absurdism makes Fefu’s very genre hard to classify. In light of these difficulties, my analysis will focus on the relationship between text and performance, which will help illuminate what I perceive to be Fornes’ central discussion in the play. In Fefu and Her Friends the narrative and performative texts create a dialectical tension, which highlights the play’s conflict between passivity and action. This dialectic plays out in the attempt to establish a community of women, while still acknowledging the myriad subjective, female consciousnesses.

Prior to her career as a playwright, Maria Irene Fornes’ experience in theater and dramatic literature was very limited, yet the little she had was greatly influential to her early work; this influence likewise colored the style and mood of Fefu and Her Friends. Maria Irene Fornes’ style and artistic sensibility is difficult to categorize, due to her wide range of subjects and genres and her refusal to offer full support of any singular political or social agenda. However, one can gain some insight into her work by understanding her background in art and theater. Born in Cuba, Fornes moved to the United States in 1945 as a young teen. Shortly thereafter she quit school and “became a bohemian” . For most of her young adulthood, Fornes was a painter. Yet in 1963, she wrote her first play, Tango Palace, with virtually no prior experience in theater or playwriting. Up until then, she had only read one play in her whole life: Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. However, she had seen the original production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Paris, and the experience transformed her life . In Fornes’ own words: “‘I didn’t understand a single word of it … I didn’t speak any French at all. But I understood the world in which it took place, I got the rhythm. And it turned my life upside down’” . Tango Palace, Fornes’ absurdist pax-de-deus, is clearly inspired by Fornes’ experience watching Godot, though it is more whimsical and comic than Beckett’s masterpiece. Lyricism and childlike innocence continue to be a hallmark throughout most of Fornes’ writing—indeed, I believe it to be the single most defining and distinguishing characteristic of her style.

Though markedly different in content, style, and tone, Fornes’ early, absurdist plays and the comparatively realistic Fefu do share certain qualities. Her early plays certainly show the influences of Beckett’s absurdism in their whimsy and decreased focus on psychological characterizations. Yet even Fefu and Fornes’ other later plays retain the sense that their characters exist only in the world of the play. Diane Lynn Moroff states that “like Beckett, Fornes subjects her characters to the theater that only in part represents the world beyond the theater. … [T]he politics of both her form and content have become more sophisticated but always within a context of deliberately articulated semiotics” . In Waiting for Godot, it is unclear whether Vladimir and Estragon are real characters with lives and memories outside of the play. Their lives outside of the play’s text are not only irrelevant, they are perhaps even nonexistent. Similarly, Fefu and her Friends is not just a snapshot of the continuous lives of these women; rather, they exist discretely within the confines of Fornes’ text. Yet Fefu, Julia, and the others do appear to have memories and pasts. These pasts do not, however, entirely inform the motivations, desires, and goals of the characters; the present alone is important. Fefu therefore exists in limbo between realism and absurdism. This informs my discussion by emphasizing the need for an analysis that considers more than the psychologies of the characters, while still considering Fefu and Her Friends to be, at heart, a drama concerning psychologically motivated characters.

Fornes’ hesitancy about Fefu’s more psychological style is clearly expressed by the year in which she sets the play. The action of the play takes place in 1935. This is important because it largely predates feminism as we know it today. But beyond that, it also predates the popular obsession with Freud and psychoanalysis that has pervaded the Western cultural consciousness since the 1950s. In an interview with Robert Coe, actress Rebecca Schull, who originally played the role of Fefu and won an Obie for her performance, recalls Fornes discussing this choice:

I remember Irene [Fornes] said at one point … that the reason she set the play in the 1930s was because she wanted it to predate the time in this country when people were full of Freud and all that psychological stuff—before it had filtered down to the masses. She wanted her characters to be just ‘behaving,’ and not analyzing their behavior. Sometimes actors will turn handsprings to get from one mood to a different mood, but that’s not the way people really behave in life. … I think it’s one of the foibles of acting to think that every change of emotion has to be prepared for a grounded, when in fact it doesn’t.

In practice, it is unlikely that the audience members would consciously understand that, since the play takes place before Freud invaded pop culture, the characters need not be psychoanalyzed. However, I do think that on some level the audience may sensually appreciate the fact that Fefu takes place in time when deep psychological conflict was not a part of everyday discourse. The setting therefore is another clue to the audience that this play is not about the psychologies of these characters, even though Fefu was the first of Fornes’ plays to have truly three-dimensional, psychologically motivated characters. This necessitates an analysis of the play’s action that combines and juxtaposes the performative and dramatic texts.

A consideration of the play’s mise-en-scene in conjunction with its narrative text helps to show that the action of Fefu and Her Friends tracks seven women’s attempts to converge into some semblance of a community. This theme is initially introduced in Part I as well as the title itself. The title expresses this theme well, if somewhat ironically. These women are Fefu’s “friends” in that they appear to talk, spend time together, share their feelings, and enjoy each other’s company, yet the play demonstrates that they are stricken with a desperate inability to connect to one another as women outside of their patriarchal society. In Part I, the audience is introduced to all of the characters individually and as a group. We certainly see the women interacting in a friendly manner, and their dialogue towards the end of Part I sets a relatively cheerful tone. Part I ends with the ominous entrance of Cecilia, who is clearly marked as an outsider—yet her position as such is not explicitly developed further. Her entrance therefore may serve to remind the audience that, in fact, this community of women is not the idyllic, joyous gathering that we think it is; it is also an indication that this play may not, in fact, be what the audience thinks it will be. Coupled with Cindy’s action of loading Fefu’s gun, the mise-en-scene of the end of Part I stands in stark contrast to the narrative text of the other women.

The intimate scenes of Part II, removed from the larger group, are intertwined in a variety of ways, which shows the underlying potential for a community of women. As indicated in the text, the scenes should be performed in four separate locations, with four distinct “sub-audiences” viewing each. After seeing a particular scene, the audience will move to another location in order to watch another scene; in this way, the scenes are performed four times each, until all the audience members have seen each of the four scenes. The order in which the scenes are viewed is unimportant, which emphasizes the private, non-presentational nature of Part II. Additionally, the fact that there is no “correct” order for this section illuminates the difficulties of unifying the splintered and disjointed scenes into a cohesive, meaningful narrative. Yet the scenes are connected in important ways. The scenes are linked together and leak into one another through acts of compassion and generosity “that have potential to be redemptive: Emma and Fefu embrace; Sue brings Julia a bowl of soup; each scene’s pain or loneliness is mediated by the entrance of a woman who rejoins the woman or women in the scene to the other women in the house” . In spite of these true moments of connection, Part II ultimately forces the audience to experience and acknowledge the myriad subjective consciousnesses within this female community. Yet many of the women seem to be talking about the same thing, all of which might be considered different gradations of Julia’s explicit suffering and paralysis. Even Fefu (who, as I discuss later, ultimately defies Julia by acting) candidly describes the horrible stasis of her life: “A black cat started coming to my kitchen. … At first I was repelled by him, but then, I thought, this is a monster that has been sent to me and I must feed him. And I fed him. One day he came and shat all over my kitchen. Foul diarrhea. He still comes and I still feed him.—I am afraid of him” . Most of the women speak of sexuality either overtly or indirectly, which also links the scenes together for the audience.

Part III begins with an oddly overt discussion between Julia, Cecilia, and Sue about the tension between community and subjectivity, which is followed by two very different, performative moments of togetherness among the women. Cecilia begins the final section of the play by explicitly voicing the implicit concern of the play:

We must be part of a community, perhaps 10, 100, 1000. It depends on how strong you are. … A common denominator must be reached. Thoughts, emotions that fit all, have to be limited to a small number. That is, I feel, the concern of the educator—to teach how to be sensitive to the differences in ourselves as well as outside ourselves … Otherwise the unusual in us will perish. As we grow we feel we are strange and fear any thought that is not shared with everyone.

Julia’s response is tied to Cecilia’s statement by the word “perish.” She discusses her own condition, and the reader/audience may begin to better understand the true torment of her paralysis: “As I feel I am perishing. My hallucinations are madness, of course, but I wish I could be with others who hallucinate also. … They can’t diagnose me. That makes me even more isolated” . Shortly after this, the women convene for their rehearsal, once again establishing a temporary community. The scene reaches a climax with Emma’s speech. The women are all very moved and applaud vigorously. Yet soon after, this meaningful, powerful, and potentially transgressive community degenerates into a juvenile, stereotypically feminine water-fight. The performative text also signifies a disruption in the cohesive group, as the women all leap to their feet to do the dishes (a predominantly female task in patriarchal society):

FEFU: (As Sue returns to her seat.) Who’s ready for coffee?

CINDY: (As she stands.) And dishes.

CHRISTINA: (As she stands.) I’ll help.

EMMA: (As she stands.) Me too.

Therefore, while the text seems to indicate a continuation of sophisticated camaraderie and togetherness, in fact the mise-en-scene contradicts this by showing the audience the group’s degeneration into frivolity. It seems that the only kind of community these women can achieve is one in which they are infantilized.

The final scene articulates the play’s longstanding yet somewhat oblique and general tension between action and passivity, specifically through a direct confrontation between violence and paralysis. Thus far, Julia’s onstage presence has ominously hinted at the underlying conflict of the play. Similarly, the gun has remained on stage, an eerie reminder of both the offstage male presence and the potential for violence. The fact that the gun may or may not be loaded augments the audience’s anxiety about it. Yet until the final scene, these two images (Julia’s wheelchair and Fefu’s gun) do not directly interact. Fefu and Julia’s discussion at the end of the play quickly becomes abstract and metaphorical:

FEFU: I saw you walking.

JULIA: No. I can’t walk.

FEFU: You came for sugar, Julia. You came for sugar. Walk!

JULIA: You know I can’t walk.

FEFU: Why not? Try! Get up! Stand up!

JULIA: What is wrong with you?

FEFU: You have given up!

JULIA: I get tired! I get exhausted! I am exhausted!.

FEFU: What is it you see? (JULIA doesn’t answer) What is it you see! Where is it you go that tires you so?

Therefore we understand that this is not just a confrontation between Fefu and Julia, but between their associated qualities of action/violence and passivity/paralysis, respectively. The women’s language also indicates their allegiances to each polarity. Fefu says “fight” many times during the scene, while Julia uses words like “can’t,” “exhausted,” and “tired” (see Appendix A for a detailed close reading of this scene). In the end, Fefu uses the gun to kill Julia; however, Julia’s murder remains on a somewhat abstracted and metaphorical plane, since the bullet does not literally hit her. This ambiguity discourages the audience from placidly accepting an easy interpretation.

The performative text in last moment of the play, in which the characters surround Julia as she dies, provides yet another ambiguous layer of meaning to the climax of Fefu’s dramatic action. The stage directions read: “(Dropping the rabbit, Fefu walks to Julia and stands behind the chair as she looks at Julia. Sue and Cindy enter from the Foyer, Emma and Paula from the kitchen, Christina and Cecilia from the lawn. They surround Julia. The lights fade.)” . At face-value this text tells us very little. In order to glean meaning, once again we must consider the performative text as witnessed by the audience. The audience is likely shocked by Julia’s death at this point, and almost certainly confused as to how to interpret it. Visually, the audience sees a group of women standing around a wounded, perhaps already dead woman. We now see that this has become an impromptu transformative moment of communal spirit and kinship. Yet of course it is neither that simple, nor entirely positive; at the same time, Julia’s limp, bleeding head is a reminder of the violence that has just occurred.

In this last moment, it might seem that Fornes asserts that only through the extermination of weakness and passivity can women ever come together into a true community; however, I do not believe this to be the case. Rather, Fefu and Her Friends’ ending is deliberately ambivalent and messy: Fefu’s action has triumphed over Julia’s paralysis, but only by her appropriation of the male-oriented object of violence (the gun). Yet Fefu is perhaps not even Julia’s real murderer. Moroff wonders to what, in fact, Julia is a victim: “To Fefu’s playing a man’s role, the role of the hunter, to Phillip’s ultimate control as the loader of the gun, to the reverberations of power plays between women and men, between women and women?” . Moroff ultimately concludes that Fornes herself is responsible for Julia’s death, but is sure to note that “Fornes’s play by no means offers Fefu’s solution as entirely palatable. Fefu closes no gaps and offers up no new choices for women by ‘murdering’ Julia” . Therefore Fefu resists a neat literary analysis, or audience experience. In the end, Fornes dialectically collides the two threads she has been wrestling with in a final, theatrical moment: passivity versus action, expressed through the conflict between performantive and dramatic text. Along with these, she also presents a final image of a community of women, though the nature of that community and the reason for its formation is disturbing and not easy to interpret.

Practically speaking, it might be difficult to incorporate all of these threads into a design concept for Fefu and Her Friends; however, the imagery of ice and water in the play provides an apt metaphor for many of the ideas discussed above. Many times in the play, the women refer to ice and water, mostly in a completely banal context. Yet what might seem to be commonplace, insignificant materials are actually laden with associations and meanings. While water is in continuous movement, ice is static and restrained. In the play, several characters refer to “plumbing”, which has associations with both flowing water and female anatomy. Additionally, there are many references to ice and ice cubes, which suggests immobility as well as confinement: “CHRISTINA: Bourbon and soda … lots of soda. Just soda … Wait … I’ll have an ice cube with a few drops of bourbon” . In light of these recurrent images, were I to direct or design Fefu, my concept would focus on the relationship between passivity versus action as expressed through various physical states of water. Appendix B shows a sample image of my visual research. Photographed in Antarctica, this image includes vast sheets of ice floating in a weird mosaic on top of water. While the ice sheets are very salient in the photo, the spaces between the pieces (i.e. the murky water beneath) are equally striking. Yet while they touch and likely collide with one another, the ice sheets are static, unchanging, and ultimately solitary. This might suggest Julia’s plight, confined to a wheelchair by her paralysis. On the other hand, Fefu’s action and violence can be considered as a kind of movement, positioned in opposition to Julia’s rigidity. This is represented in the image by the seemingly tiny ship, plowing through the vast sheets of ice and disrupting their imbalanced yet static mosaic. This inspiration could be reflected in a production through the use of color—whites and cool blues to convey the sense of ice and water.

Ultimately, Fefu and Her Friends positions passivity against action through the dialectical tension between performance and text. This dual-layered conflict is expressed through the constant struggle to form a female community. All of these ideas are magnified and pushed up against one another in the final scene of the play. Specifically, violence and paralysis mirror the conflict between action and passivity, which helps bring this oblique tension to the surface of the audience’s understanding. These various dialectical tensions, which for the most part do not enter the play’s thematic forefront, may guide the audience to a feminist consideration of Fefu. This analysis has aligned Fefu with action, violence, and movement on one hand, and Julia with passivity, paralysis, and stasis on the other, thereby drawing them as oppositional forces even more so than the text may explicitly state. Following this line of thought, the audience may come to consider the implications of such an extreme tension between seeming dualities, particularly when it is between two characters of the same gender. Taking these issues and the use of dialectical tensions into account can also suggest design concepts; I have focused on the motif of water/ice within Fefu, and how it can express the conflicts that my analysis has considered. However, Fefu and Her Friends in production might best be served by careful attention to the interactions between the performative and dramatic texts, since it is clear that the dialectical relationship between the two expresses Fornes’ intentions, in a way that either one alone could not.

Lighting design and visual research

LIGHTING DESIGN VISUAL RESEARCH
-The clap on, max $20

Easy to make/Recycled lamps

Shadows possibly used for Julia's bedroom scene

Actors Control the lighting.