[In the following, which was first published in 1981, Pevitts reads Fefu and Her Friends as a feminist play.]

Maria Irene Fornes explores basic feminist issues in her play, Fefu and Her Friends. Although set in 1935, the play explores lives of contemporary women. The sensibility, the subject matter, the "universal" female characters, and the very structure of the play are clearly feminist. The eight women's lives viewed in Fefu are seen, especially in the second part of the play, as being repetitive and capable of being viewed in any random sequence; yet even as women we do not respond negatively to this suggestion. In the very repetition of the four scenes that are played simultaneously we view intimately women's need for women. Although the title character says women need men because we cannot feel safe with each other, the other characters prove her wrong as they interact.

In Fefu and Her Friends Fornes defines what can happen when women recognize their own worth, and each other: "And if they shall recognize each other, the world will be blown apart." The play is a delicate piece on the surface and resilient underneath. It is fluid, structured like music, a "fugue," says the playwright. The play takes place in an affluent New England home in 1935. Eight female characters are introduced: they discuss woman's loathsomeness, settle relationships among themselves, rehearse speeches, and recount visions. Fornes's nonstereotypical characters speak as selves, not in roles of mother, daughter, bitch, witch, or virgin. She breathes into her characters humor and intelligence. The loving of one's self and the despising of one's self are both examined as well as woman's inclination not to trust other women. Fornes calls the play totally female, "it's so profoundly us."

Women find themselves in a familiar world in this play in which characters and character relationships mean more than plot, and structure is more important than character. The audience viewing the play is brought into the play as they are moved from room to room of the house. The opening and closing scenes are played in the living room of Fefu's home, but the four scenes played within this framework, Part Two, are played simultaneously in four different rooms. The cyclical four scenes reveal the characters tenderly interacting, bound up in each other's Uves. By moving to the characters' spaces, the audience knows the reason(s) all eight of these women are getting together. One discovers intimately with the performers "how woman feels about being a woman."

Fornes builds the play like an architect, with a sense of progress and a sense of performance:

A playwright has to have a very abstract mind and has to see a play like an architect. One has to see the whole building and also structure and foundations and how these things are made and see it so it doesn't fall apart… . The novel is more delicate, the construction of a play is "tougher."

Fefu is cinematic, in both structure and acting style. The framework of Part One and Part Three contains all of the characters. The four scenes with simultaneous life, Part Two, that nest between the two framework parts, contain within each scene only two or three characters interacting. These "substance scenes" present not plot but character development and relationships. The play incorporates stop action, jump cuts, and replay as the audience moves from room to room to room to see each of the four scenes in Part Two. As one flows from space to space, and as each scene is repeated four times, the rooms have simultaneous life. The scenes and the parts of the play are interrelated by accretion of the whole. The through line of action, the passage of time, is merely the sequence of events. The women arrive, they greet each other in Part One. They separate, they read, they share, they rest, they discuss, they play croquet in the second part. Part One is morning, Part Two is afternoon, and Part Three is early evening and contains the climactic event scene.

There are five different environments. Experiencing the play, kinesthetically moving from room to room, becomes more important than following a story. In a proscenium setting the audience has a fixed perspective. In Fefu the audience moves about the rooms of the house. The movement is special because the audience is enclosed with the performers within the four walls. The audience is on only two sides of the rooms in the four simultaneous scenes in Part Two, and when the audience looks at the performers they do not see other audience members behind the players. It is, as Fornes expressed it, rather like being a witness. The audience is experientially involved in the play, not following a linear story. Instead, they overhear conversations, witness a series of encounters.

Scenes are intricately interwoven. Cindy and Christina are in the study through which Sue passes on her way with the soup to Julia's bedroom where Julia lies in bed hallucinating. Paula and Cecilia revive and resolve an old relationship in the kitchen while Fefu and Emma play croquet on the lawn. The linkage of the four scenes is both linear and vertical. A rhythm of involvement and disengagement works through all six scenes of the play. Fefu, like Sue, weaves through two other areas of the four playing areas during the four simultaneous scenes. These two characters link the scenes through all of Part Two. Fefu moves through the study/living room to the kitchen for lemonade and back out to the lawn. The fourth (last) time she takes other characters with her while Paula moves to the study/living room to play the piano.

In the third part of the play, the audience comes together again as a whole after having viewed the four separate groups while each of the scenes played four times. "If the timing is not impeccable there will be no scene," says Fornes. If someone other than Fornes were to direct the play, she thinks it would be very difficult to do unless it were thought of as music. She also comments,

Style is different in the first and third scenes from the style in the center of the play. These scenes are more theatrical in style and take on a larger life. The shape that a play of mine takes has to do with my own need for a certain creative output.

Fornes says that with plot we are concerned with the mechanics of how we manage in the world, so play without plot deals with the mechanics of the mind, some kind of spiritual survival, a process of thought. The temporal awareness of the characters is related to the segmentation of the play's structure. The audience is pulled into this play that is as fluid and free as water. They are captured in its depth perceptually and physically by moving to the characters' spaces as well as by perceiving them visually and aurally.

The central scene of the play is Julia's hallucinating scene in bed in Part Two. It is a moving scene in which the character speaks clearly thoughts many women know.

The human being is of the masculine gender. The human being is a boy as a child and grown up he is a man. Everything on earth is for the human being, which is man… . 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.—If a man commits an evil act, he must be pitied. The evil comes from outside him, through him and into the act. Woman generated the evil herself.—God gave man no other mate but woman …—Man is spiritually sexual, he therefore can enjoy sexuality. His sexuality is physical which means his spirit is pure. Women's spirit is sexual … Their sexual feelings remain with them till they die. And they take those feelings with them to the afterlife where they corrupt the heavens, and they are sent to hell where through suffering they may shed those feelings and return to earth as man.

Julia's thesis in Fefu is "the mind like the body is made to suffer to such a degree as to become crippled."

In the opening scene of Fefu, the title character points out that "women are loathsome." She gives the proof by reasoning the rational male way, by comparing woman to a rock that on the exterior "is smooth and dry and clean" and is on the internal, interior, underneath side "slimy, filled with fungus and crawling with worms." This represents, she says, "another life that is parallel to the one we manifest." She continues, "If you don't recognize it … it eats you." The exterior appearance of woman and the interior appearance of woman can be readily compared to the image woman has been made into—the commercial view of the world (provided by men) into which women recreate their own images already created for them. The two sides of the rock represent how women feel about the image that has been created of them. And if we (women) do not realize it and recognize it, the underneath side does rot with the fungus and worms found there. If we do recognize this image, as Fefu later tells us, if we recognize ourselves as women, "the world will be blown apart." When this does happen, the reflection that was made by others will be destroyed and we will be able to rebuild ourselves in our own image, created by woman. The character Julia, trapped and oppressed, who at one point of her life was "afraid of nothing," and "knew so much" that the others wondered how one so young could know so much, is the character who is symbolically killed in the end of the play so that the new image of herself can emerge.

For many women becoming a feminist has caused a personal transformation. Fefu and some of the other contemporary plays by women concern themselves with the expression of this transformation, the transformation of the personal into mythos. Playwright Tina Howe suggests:

If a woman really explored the areas that make her unique as a woman, was radical in her femininity, the commercial theatre would be terrified. For a woman to deal artistically with her womanhood is a dangerous territory and hard to write. I keep a distance from the more radical feelings I have as a woman, partly from the fear I have of being stoned to death and partly because those feelings are very personal. I'm not so sure I could handle them, but I think it's high time someone did.

Plays by women playwrights are coming to have a feminist consciousness. Whether the writers actively intend their work to reveal this or not, the experience of coming to know the truth about one's self and one's society is revealed in plays by women. Maria Irene Fornes says that Fefu and Her Friends is a feminist play.

The play is about women. It's a play that deals with each one of these women with enormous tenderness and affection. I have not deliberately attempted to see these women "as women have rarely been seen before." I show the women as I see them and if it is different from the way they've been seen before, it's because that's how I see them. The play is not fighting anything, not negating anything. My intention has not been to confront anything. I felt as I wrote the play that I was surrounded by friends. I felt very happy to have such good and interesting friends.

Fornes says her plays are not "idea plays," neither do they, as the playwright says, "present a formulated thesis." This play with no walls takes on the fragility of fine, thin, hand-blown crystal. Fornes says that in the process of auditioning extremely talented people she came to view the play as if it had glass walls and that she felt some of these people would break the walls. When she views plays far away from herself, she says the characters become two dimensional, that they are like drawings rather than like flesh and blood. In a realistic play one can feel the characters "breathe"; in a more abstract play it is the play that breathes, not the characters. In Fefu and Her Friends the characters "breathe"; it is an extraordinary play because it explores some of the very basic fears and issues of feminist sensibilities and yet it is a personal feminist statement. Maria Irene Fornes's play is as fluid as water, as fragile as breakable glass, and as durable as the metaphoric rock.