Feminism, Metatheatricality, and Mise-en-scène in Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends

Feminism, Metatheatricality, and Mise-en-scene in Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends PENNY FARFAN The first time that Maria Irene Fornes attended a rehearsal of one of her plays, she was amazed to be informed by the director that she should not communicate her ideas about staging directly to the actors but should instead make written notes that they would discuss together over coffee after rehearsal. This exclusion of the playwright from the rehearsal process seemed to Fornes "like the most absurd thing in the world.'" As she later commented, It's as if you have achild, yourown baby, and you take the baby to school and the baby is crying and the teacher says, "Please I'll take care of it. Make a note: at the end of the day you and Ican talk about it." You'd think. 'This woman is crazy. I'm not going 10 leave my kid here with this insane person.'2 Since her initial theatrical experience, Fornes has directed many of the first productions of her own work, having resolved that if she did not direct, the "work would not be done" at all.3 She has "never [seen] any difference between writing and directing"4 and for this reason she rarely goes into rehearsal with a completed script in hand.5 The organic relationship between dramaturgy and mise-en-scene in Fornes's work is perhaps nowhere more evident than in her 1977 play Fefu and Her Friends, in the middle section of which the audience is divided into quaners, taken out of the main auditorium, and rotated through four intimate playing areas representing rooms in Fefu's house. where the actresses simultaneously repeat interlocking yet distinct s_ cenes four times, once for each section oJ the audience. Fornes arrived at this unique staging by chance while she was looking for a space in which to present her as-yet-unfinished play: I did not like the space I found because it had large columns. But then I was taken backstage to the rooms the audience could not see. I saw the dreSSing room, and I Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 442 Fornes's Fefll and Her Friends 443 thought, "How nice. This could be a room in Fefn's house." Then I was taken to the greenroom. I thought that this also could be a room in Fefu 's house. Then we went to the business office to discuss terms. That office was the study of Fefu's house ... I asked if we could use all of their rooms for the performances, and they agreed. I had written Julia's speechin the bedroom already. Ihad intended to put it on stage and I had not yet arrived at how it would come about. Part of the kitchen scene was written, but Ihad thought it would be happening in the living room. So Ihad parts of it already. It was the rooms themselves that modi~ied the scenes which originally I planned to put in the living room. People asked me, when the play opened, if I had written those scenes to be done in different rooms and then found the space. No. They were written that way because the space was there.6 Yet while Fornes attributes the staging of Fefu and Her Friends to chance, she has also stated, "When something happens by accident, I trust that the play is making its own point. I feel something is happening that is very profound and very important."7 Indeed, as I will argue here, in reconfiguring the conventional performer-spectator relationship, Fornes's mise-en-scene in Fefu and Her Friends realizes in theatrica1 tenns an alternative model for interaction with the universe external to the self such as that proposed by the metatheatrical actress/educator-character Emma as a means of transforming Fefu's pain. In this respect, Fefu and Her Friends posits postmodem feminist theatre practice as a constructive response to the psychic dilemmas of the play's female characters. As Emma says, "Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we're showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre.'" Set in New England in...