By Spring of 2021, it was a cliché to comment that the COVID-19 pandemic had forced major changes in our lives, our work, and our art. NAU’s production of Fefu and Her Friends was of course not immune to these changes. As I originally envisioned the production, it would have retained its original 1930s setting, and, as playwright Maria Irene Fornés suggests, audience members would have traveled around the Clifford E. White theatre in the play’s second half, encountering each of the four scenes that make up that part of the play in small groups. Actors would have performed these four scenes four times each, allowing each group of spectators to view them, and creating four distinct paths through the show. Fornés wrote the play in this manner to allow audiences unique and intimate access to the lives of the eight women in the play.
With the onset of the pandemic, however, came a nation-wide transition to online, streaming theatre. As I discovered over the rehearsal process, this transition has forced a very different audience experience of Fefu, but one which I have come to believe retained Fornés’ original vision. We transplanted the setting of the play from 1930 to 2021, and moved the action of the play from Fefu’s enormous hunting lodge to a Zoom meeting which the characters attend from their own homes. Rather than moving between rooms in Fefu’s home, audiences were guided into a series of virtual “breakout rooms,” in which they encountered Fornés’ characters having the same discussions about love, fear, mental health, identity, and gender as they would have in an in-person production. What resulted from these changes was an intimate look at the way in which women speak to each other when they are alone together. Strikingly, the conversations they have—and the anxieties they voice—resonated just as loudly in 2021 as they did in 1930 (or in the 1970s, when Fornés wrote the play). Perhaps even more strikingly, audiences may have recognized in Fornés’ characters the same sense of isolation, and the same desperate desire for connection that we all felt during the 2020/2021 COVID-19 quarantine. Like us, Fornés’ women are seeking to bridge the divides between them, reaching out across the wires for comfort, laughter, and friendship.
With the onset of the pandemic, however, came a nation-wide transition to online, streaming theatre. As I discovered over the rehearsal process, this transition has forced a very different audience experience of Fefu, but one which I have come to believe retained Fornés’ original vision. We transplanted the setting of the play from 1930 to 2021, and moved the action of the play from Fefu’s enormous hunting lodge to a Zoom meeting which the characters attend from their own homes. Rather than moving between rooms in Fefu’s home, audiences were guided into a series of virtual “breakout rooms,” in which they encountered Fornés’ characters having the same discussions about love, fear, mental health, identity, and gender as they would have in an in-person production. What resulted from these changes was an intimate look at the way in which women speak to each other when they are alone together. Strikingly, the conversations they have—and the anxieties they voice—resonated just as loudly in 2021 as they did in 1930 (or in the 1970s, when Fornés wrote the play). Perhaps even more strikingly, audiences may have recognized in Fornés’ characters the same sense of isolation, and the same desperate desire for connection that we all felt during the 2020/2021 COVID-19 quarantine. Like us, Fornés’ women are seeking to bridge the divides between them, reaching out across the wires for comfort, laughter, and friendship.
