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.