Fefu, Her Friends, and Their Private Suffering (Made Public)

One woman’s take on a glamorous, site-specific production of a María Irene Fornés play where Beauty abounds—and the women themselves lay interred somewhere beneath.

By Claire Tumey

3.25.2025

I regard the process of theatre-making as not dissimilar to the process of building a friendship. There are a million and one ways to produce a play, just as there are a million and one ways to make and keep a friend.

Some friendships are mystery phone numbers we keep forgetting to add to our contacts, despite the number of times the person on the other end of the line must answer our ego-damning question: “Sorry, who is this again?”

Some are like golden index cards in a rolodex. We laud ourselves for our resourcefulness in acquiring them, while they nevertheless collect dust from lack of actual use.

The good friendships, and the good plays, are ones that, to loosely quote Octavia Butler, are constant in their change: in the ways that they challenge and change us, and in the ways that we, as friends, collaborators, audience members, and critics, challenge and change them in return. Friendships and plays are their own sorts of activism. We must approach them with clear intention, integrity, and dedication that not only withstands conflict but stands to be fortified by it.

Fefu and Her Friends is an old(ish) friend of mine. I first saw and fell in love with María Irene Fornés’s seminal work of the avant-garde at Theatre for a New Audience in 2019. Though Fornés strayed from aligning herself too closely with any particular set of identity politics, critics and audiences have lauded Fefu for decades as a hallmark of the canon of feminist theatre. The play explores the complex territory between the banal and the ephemeral in the lives of eight educated, middle-to-upper-class women as they gather to rehearse a presentation for some vague shared charitable endeavor. At the time of its original publication and production circa 1977 during feminism’s second wave, Fefu challenged the very notions of what theatre can be: whose stories are told, and who tells them; how they are dramatized; what constitutes a compelling “plot” (used loosely here, as Fornés often asserted her supreme interest in compelling characterization over an easily digestible narrative); even the role and expectation of how the audience interacts with it. I believe Fornés’s work can be likened to Shakespeare’s in the importance of its contribution to the canon, and in its potential for universality—if the lens we are given to view it is clear, focused, and unique in its calibration.

When I left Sophie Dushko’s production of Fefu last week, I came to the conclusion that the lens I was handed had more of a mirrorball effect, reflecting the multiplicity of womanhood in fragments that appeared dazzling but ultimately shrouded and distracted from the depth behind Fornés's singular words.

    

On the night of the invited preview performance, I ascended the stairs at the 14th street ACE subway stop, my face buried in my phone as I navigated my way to an address which had been disclosed to me via email 48 hours before curtain. I followed the dotted line on my map app of choice to its end, looking up to find myself at the facade of what I’d later learn to be the functional family home of fashion designer Nanette Lepore (her daughter Violet Savage produced the play and acted as the bohemian “divine lover” Emma). Truthfully, I’d never stepped foot in a Manhattan townhouse before, and as someone who finds it difficult to divorce my political beliefs from my criticism of theatre, I’d be lying if I said current events did not leave somewhat of a sour taste in my mouth for such an overt display of wealth. Still, if we’re talking about a play originally written for and about privileged Anglos in the 1930s, turning a townhouse in the exclusive West Village neighborhood into the setting and actual venue has the potential to create a rich (no pun intended) meta-theatrical landscape, offering what could either be interpreted as a critique or glorification of wealth. Stella Gatti, the production designer, had much to work from in her styling of the “set”: glorious wood-panelled walls filled with books on books on books; an unmissable giant recreation of one of Numa Ayrinhac’s portraits of Eva Perón; photographs spanning decades of family life; unending et cetera. Deer motifs (ranging from subtle shelf menageries to not-so-subtle mirror frames hewn from what seemed to be antlers) abounded, making me wonder if they spoke more to Lepore’s coincidental affinity for the forest creature or to Gatti’s desire to hint at an important plot point involving one of the characters and a fateful run-in with a deer hunter and his prey. Lepore herself even acted as the de facto costume designer, with some of the pieces sourced from her “vintage archive.”

Fefu and Her Friends begins and ends in the formal drawing room. Conveniently, the designer’s townhouse comes equipped with one of those. I sat on a metal stool mere centimeters away from luxurious furnishings and priceless family heirlooms and watched as the friends, one by one, arrived at Fefu’s estate. The circumstances of the play don’t particularly matter all that much—it’s the internal lives of the eight women themselves that the playwright was interested in dissecting and putting on display. In between those drawing room bookends, the audience members were split into small groups and given the opportunity to see four scenes happening simultaneously in four different parts of the house (the billiards room, the kitchen, the study, and the bathroom). Each scene repeated four times, giving each group of voyeurs the chance to nose around every inch of this meet-up of well-to-do housewives and otherwise highly educated professional women.

Unfortunately, I found it hard to bear witness to these characters laying bare their deeply detailed idiosyncrasies when all the while, the production could not escape the specificity of the Lepore-Savage family’s personal style in every moment, apropos of nothing. It seems the focus—insufficient as it was—was to make the play fit the space instead of the other way around. I was consistently overwhelmed by the breadth of stylization both in Dushko’s direction and in the omnipresence of the actual homeowner’s most intimate tastes, delivered to the audience without clear dramaturgical support. The play seemed always particular, but rarely cohesive.

I was baffled by the dissonance created by Christina (played by a grounded and serious Lauren Guglielmello), dressed in 1930’s period silks, her hair perfectly coiffed in victory rolls, learning French on her iPhone via Duolingo. I was taken out of the genuine intrigue present in the complicated relationship between Cecilia (played by the stunning yet underutilized Kim Savarino) and Paula (my favorite performance of the night from a charming and witty Erin Noll) by the questionable choice to give Paula a sporadic dependence on a cotton-candy-colored Elf Bar. One could argue there is intention behind the decision to blend and blur time, suggesting that these characters exist in abstraction, where the past is in direct communique with the present day. However, I’m afraid one forgoes the plausibility of that take when one also chooses such overt site-specificity in the form of a well-known fashion designer’s Manhattan townhouse circa 2025. Beyond that, I truly do believe the power in these characters is their grounding in realism, in the concretized nature of their gilded cage. As Cecilia says at the top of Part Three, “we cannot survive in a vacuum”; neither can this play.

    

Fornés’s script abounds with rich and nuanced monologues which, to the attuned ear, have much to say about the socially constructed root causes of the many facets of gender-based oppression. I’m sorry to have completely lost two of the play’s most important monologues: Cindy, embodied with warmth and amiability by the performer Gagarin, delivers a monologue in Part Two where she tells Christina about a harrowing dream (while there were two non-binary actors cast in this production, all characters retained she/her pronouns). It’s a moment—made fresh through a transgender performer’s voice—in which the playwright highlights gender-based and sexual violence, and the toll these systemic phenomena take on the psyche. Unfortunately, the moment was robbed of its impact due to sound bleeding from the two scenes happening in too-close proximity on either side of it (an understandable obstacle for a play in which multiple scenes are happening at once). Savage, though undeniably beguiling in her interpretation of Emma, seemed more committed to her choreography with the lavish garment she donned to perform her barn-busting theatrical thesis on the human condition than she did in actually conveying said thesis’s revolutionary intent. Other costume pieces—like Fefu’s gilded-age tailcoat, looksmaxxed with velvety violet short-shorts, knee-high patent leather lace-up boots, and fishnet tights—violently contrasted with Julia’s modern all-gray, cotton-blend sweatsuit (a workhorse for designers who want us to know that “this character has a screw loose.”)

The actors did have their moments, as mentioned above and as further noted hereafter. Gabrielle Carrubba exhibited impressive dexterity and control as the spiritually and mentally troubled Julia. The audience witnesses her alone in the bathroom in Part Two, as she experiences a hallucinatory episode, haunted by what may well be the ghosts of the patriarchy’s past and present. In this challenging scene—where the actor can fall all too easily into the trap of playing at mental illness instead of finding the sanity, the true reasoning, behind the insanity—Julia recites a “prayer” chock-full of some of the oldest “women-are-sexual-by-nature-and-thus-evil” talking points in recorded history. Carrubba expelled the ideology as if she were performing an exorcism on herself, her delicately manicured hands shaking and convulsing around her head like a halo of her own designation. While I prefer a more subdued approach to Julia and her compounded physical and mental strain, I admired Carrubba’s skill and commitment to the physical and vocal demands of this particular interpretation. I also deeply enjoyed the acerbic and often comedic relief that Michelle Moriarty supplied as the introverted Sue.

But beyond these and perhaps a few other fleeting moments, I never felt I was allowed to see the true hearts of these characters, hearts that I do believe, to quote Fefu herself, are “slimy and filled with fungus and crawling with worms,” as all human hearts are. No, the women I saw, like the environment in which their drama was staged, were beautiful, poised and posing, glamorous and clean, even in their interior despair, their internalized revulsion. It all felt like a spectacle of resources, a materialistic conquest that potentially stole opportunities from the actors themselves to tell the story, to stake a claim in answering the questions, “Why this play? Why now?”

The revival I saw in 2019 was still rooted most obviously in the year 1935. I couldn’t quite determine the time and place Dushko intended as the backdrop for this production due to the mixed aesthetic cues. I’m craving to see a production of this play that brings our current social politics and wave of feminism into the conversation, which would necessitate a much more concentrated effort in prioritizing intersectionality. Dushko seems to have hit the tip of that iceberg as it concerns her choice to cast non-binary performers and a woman of color. And class-consciousness was sometimes apparent, most evident in Part Three when Paula delivers a rumination on how wealth ultimately breeds more malaise than prosperity in the individual and collective lives of the human race (the White Lotus of it all, you know.) Fornés, writing from the intersection of the Cuban-American and working class experiences, no doubt had her own personal perspective on these characters, whose backgrounds differed vastly from her own. But the true possibility for the longevity of this script lies in a director’s ability to find resonance, which necessitates a firm and honest footing in the here and now. Third-wave feminism and its foremost leaders—bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Judith Butler, Tarana Burke, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Stacey Park Milbern, the list goes on—have given my generation the gift of comprehensive language toward the understanding that the compounding injustices of ableism, racism, classism, and transmisia are inextricably tied to the struggle for gender parity, and that gender parity cannot ever truly be accomplished without the eradication of all injustice everywhere. I believe that if she were alive and working today, Fornés would be a contemporary of this new wave of feminist thought. If she wouldn’t explicitly align herself with the movement, just as she refrained from doing during the second wave, then I imagine she’d still be considered a co-conspirator through her approach to playwriting: an approach that, at its core, emphasized theatre’s great power of humanization, its ability to reflect the most urgent of our sociopolitical crises not as a mirrorball, in fragments, but as a reflecting pool, constantly moving but consistent in its depth and clarity.

Plays and friendships—like this play, and like the friendships it depicts—are complicated, hard to get right. Fefu and Her Friends might just be one of those gargantuan works that would benefit most from an intensive, Berliner-ensemble-esque extended rehearsal period or some other process where the artists are given ample time to live inside their characters, outside of the pressures that a late-stage capitalistic theatrical landscape heaves upon us (often nonconsensually). Opportunity is scarce, and you have to work with what you’ve got; I suppose that if what you’ve got is a New York townhouse, you should absolutely work with it. At the end of the day, I think to shine a light on this underproduced masterpiece is a noble endeavor in and of itself, and I was grateful for the opportunity to see the play again in the hands of artists who clearly approached the work with enthusiasm and love. I simply wish I felt more upon leaving that completely unreal, real apartment—something more than just the sinking feeling that I had left a world that the artists were keen to project onto me but unsure of how to actually let me into.

Fefu and Her Friends, produced by Farmhands Production, has concluded its sold-out, one-weekend run from March 20-23, 2025.