Fefu and Her Friends

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-- Voltairine de Cleyre,  “The Dominant Idea” 

Fefu feels that her ideas are dominated by her body and her womanhood, and wishes to free herself from the confines of both. Julia, on the other hand, working to dominate the body with her ideas, but this often appears in the form of uncontrollable thoughts and hallucinations.

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Una, Lady Troubridge, 1924, oil on canvas.

Romaine Brooks (1874–1970) lived most of her life in Paris where she was a leading figure of an artistic counterculture of upper-class Europeans and American expatriates, many of whom were creative, bohemian, and homosexual. Brooks crafted an androgynous appearance that challenged conventional ideas of how women should look and behave, and these ideas extended to many of the portraits she painted in the 1920s, which are some of her best known works. ---Smithsonian American Art Museum

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“Women” by Louise Brogan (1923)

Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going down under culverts Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys, They stiffen, when they should bend. They use against themselves that benevolence To which no man is friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field Or of clean wood cleft by an axe. Their love is an eager meaninglessness Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them A shout and a cry. As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills They should let it go by.

“Men have natural strength. Women have to find their strength, and when they do find it, it comes forth with bitterness and it’s erratic.... Women are restless with each other. They are like live wires... either chattering to keep themselves from making contact, or else, if they don’t chatter, they avert their eyes...” --Fefu

“Woman is not a human being. She is: 1-- A mystery. 2-- Another species. 3-- As yet undefined. 4-- Unpredictable; therefore wicked and gentle and evil and good which is evil.” --Julia

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Margaret Fishback, "Here Today Gone Tomorrow" from I Feel Better Now. Copyright © 1932 by Margaret Fishback.

Fefu seems to be at her happiest and most invigorated when she is venturing into the unknown-- she thrives on undependable elements. She is constantly toying with the idea of life and what it means to be living, yet regularly seems to risk the safety of those around her with her gun and her risky behavior.

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The timing of the Great Depression varied across the world— in most countries, it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century.  Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15% (by comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession). Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s, however, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II. (1/4) 

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Bourbon - Bourbon whiskey is a type of American whiskey, a barrel-aged distilled spirit made primarily from corn. It was recognized in 1964 by the United States Congress as a "distinctive product of the United States". Bourbon sold in the United States must be produced in the U.S. from at least 51% corn and stored in a new container of charred oak. Note that prohibition ended just two years before the start of the play.

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Blank - A blank is a type of firearm cartridge that contains no bullet, and instead uses paper or plastic wadding to seal the propellant into the casing. When discharged, the blank generates a muzzle flash and an explosive sound like any normal gunshots, and the firearm experiences a recoil, but the wadding propelled from the barrel quickly loses kinetic energy and is incapable of inflicting any damage beyond a very immediate distance.

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American Place Theatre; Jan. 8, 1978. Directed by Maria Irene Fornes, set design by Kert Lundell and Nancy Tobias, lighting by Edward M. Greenberg, costumes by Theo Barnes. 

Approximately half of the cast stayed the same as the original production, with Dorothy Lyman, Elizabeth Perry, Arleigh Richards, and Judith Roberts replacing Brown (Cindy), Hearn (Christina), Biehl (Sue), and Voukides (Cecilia), respectively.

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“One thing I remember was at the end, when [Fefu] tiptoes in to see Julia in the chair, I think she said to me something like, ‘This is when you’re creeping along a wall and you running your finger along a wall and you don’t want to be heard or seen.’ That was the kind of thing she would say, and so you got a sense of what she was trying to convey. But this [new] production is so different from what we did, because originally we did it in a loft in SoHo, which is why she came up with this amazing idea of separating everyone into four groups, because it was a flat. It was a loft people lived in, so there wasn’t a huge area and the audiences were limited to 100 people total, so each group had 25 people, so it was all on a very small scale. That’s the original production.” 

--Rebecca Schull

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Maria Irene Fornés was born in 1930 in Havana, Cuba, and was the youngest of six siblings. She immigrated to New York in 1945 with her mother and one of her sisters after the death of her father, then moved to Paris in 1954 with her lover and writer Harriet Sohmers to study painting, but returned to New York in 1957. She began writing plays in the early 60’s during her relationship with writer Susan Sontag, when she would sit and write with Sontag to encourage her. She wrote 44 plays between 1961 and 2000, notably And What of the Night?, Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, and Sarita. She has received nine Obie Awards for directing, playwriting, and best new American play (as well as a lifetime achievement award), and in 2001 won the Robert Chelsea award, an award presented by the Publishing Triangle to honor LQGBT+ playwrights.