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.