[In the following essay, Farfan maintains that, for Fornes, there exists an "organic relationship" between the writing and the directing of her plays.]

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."¹ As she later commented,

It's as if you have a child, your own 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 I can talk about it." You'd think "This woman is crazy. I'm not going to 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-enscène 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 quarters, 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 scenes four times, once for each section of 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 thought, "How nice. This could be a room in Fefu'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 speech in the bedroom already. I had 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 I had thought it would be happening in the living room. So I had parts of it already. It was the rooms themselves that modified 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-scène in Fefu and Her Friends realizes in theatrical terms 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 postmodern 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."⁸

Set in New England in 1935, Fefu and Her Friends involves eight women who seem to share a common educational background and who gather at Fefu's house to prepare for what seems to be a fundraising project relating to education. One of these women, Julia, suffers from a mysterious and apparently psychosomatic illness that became evident a year earlier when she coUasped after a hunter shot a deer. She has not walked since and still occasionally blanks out. Alone in her bedroom in Part Two, Julia undergoes a long hallucination punctuated by threats and blows from invisible "judges" who seem to epitomize patriarchal authority (33-6). During the course of her hallucination, she reveals that the onset of her illness was a punishment for having got "too smart" and that the conditions of her survival were to become crippled and to remain silent about what she knows. Even now, however, though she attempts to appease the judges by reciting a creed of the central tenets of patriarchal ideology, Julia remains covertly but essentially defiant and unindoctrinated, challenging conventional wisdom relating to women and attempting to get the judges off the trail of her friend Fefu, who is also considered to be "too smart" (34). Thus, in the 1930s context in which the play is set, Julia's physical symptoms both express and suppress her resistance to women's subordination within patriarchal society, as did those of the "smart" female hysterics treated by Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, and others around the turn of the century.⁹

Described by Fornes as "the mind of the play—the seer, the visionary,"¹⁰ Julia herself implies that her insights into the patriarchal construction of female inferiority are repressed common knowledge when she states at the end of her Part Two monologue, "They say when I believe the prayer I will forget the judges. And when I forget the judges I will believe the prayer. They say both happen at once. And all women have done it. Why can't I?" (35, emphasis added). Julia's connection to the other characters in the play is borne out by the simultaneous staging of Part Two, when, at the same time that she is in the bedroom reciting the patriarchal creed under threat of violence from invisible tormentors, Paula is in the kitchen describing the pain of breaking up with her lover Cecilia, Cindy is in the study recounting a nightmare about an abusive male doctor, and Emma and Fefu are on the lawn discussing Emma's obsession with genitals and Fefu's "constant pain" (29). Fornes's sense of the appropriateness of a certain amount of sound-spill between the various playing areas in Part Two suggests that Julia's forbidden knowledge functions as the intermittently or partially audible subtext underlying all the characters' interactions, which have been described by W.B. Worthen as "transformations of Julia's more explicit subjection."¹¹

The connection between Julia and the other characters is confirmed in Part Three of Fefu and Her Friends when the women reminisce about their college days in terms that resonate with and confirm the reality of her hallucinations: female intelligence is associated in these recollections with madness, while college professors and doctors are represented as actual versions of Julia's hallucinated judges and are referred to similarly, by means of the pronoun "they" (55-66). Elaine Showalter has written that "hysteria and feminism … exist on a kind of continuum" and that "[i]f we see the hysterical woman as one end of the spectrum of a female avant-garde struggling to redefine women's place in the social order, then we can also see feminism as the other end of the spectrum, the alternative to hysterical silence, and the determination to speak and act for women in the public world."¹² The common educational background of the women in Fefu and Her Friends signifies their shared experience of the pressure to become indoctrinated into the system of beliefs outlined in Julia's prayer. At the same time, the reunion of these women on the basis of their ongoing commitment to education may suggest a fundamental concern on Fornes's part with representing characters engaged in the project of researching alternative modes of response to the knowledge articulated by the hysteric Julia as "the mind of the play." In this sense, the term Lehrstiick or "learning play" that Bonnie Marranea has used to describe Fornes's 1987 work Abingdon Square is applicable to Fefu and Her Friends as well.¹³

Julia aligns herself explicitly with Fefu, implying that she also is too smart and is therefore in similar danger of punishment by the judges; and indeed, of all the characters in the play, Fefu is most directly involved in the struggle that has left Julia crippled. Fefu is married to a man she claims to need and desire, but who has told her that he "[married her] to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are" and who engages her in a terrible "game" whereby he falls to the ground after she shoots at him with a rifle that has thus far been loaded with blanks but that he has threatened one day to load with a real bullet (7, 11-13). Fefu's interest in the male-associated activities of shooting and plumbing and her assertions that she "like[s] men better than women" and that she "like[s] being … thinking … [f]eeling like a man" (15) indicate that her strategy for coping with the pain of her marriage is male-identification, but this mode of response is problematized by the presence of female friends who cause her to confront the patriarchal construction of female inferiority. In the opening scene, for example, Cindy forces Fefu to acknowledge a discrepancy between what her husband Phillip says about women being "loathsome" and what she herself knows of women based on her own personal experience (7-9). This invalidation of her posture of male-identification makes being around women a dangerous situation for Fefu. As she states in Part One,

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 … like Orpheus … as if a god once said"and if they shall recognize each other, the world will be blown apart." They are always eager for the men to arrive. When they do, they can put themselves at rest, tranquilized and in a mild stupor. With the men they feel safe. The danger is gone. That's the closest they can be to feeling wholesome. Men are muscle that cover the raw nerve. They are the insulators. The danger is gone, but the price is the mind and the spirit … High price.—I've never understood it. Why?—What is feared?—Hmmm. Well …—Do you know? Perhaps the heavens would fall.

(15)

The devastating recognition scene that this speech anticipates occurs near the end of the play when, in a moment that may support Julia's assertion that "[h]allucinations are real" (44), Fefu "sees" Julia walking and understands that her illness is a psychosomatic response to an insight that she will not or cannot communicate except through the hysterical paralysis of her body (55). Unaccepting of what she perceives as Julia's passive and voluntary submission, Fefu tries to force her to her feet to fight and then takes action herself, exiting to the lawn with the now-loaded rifle. Like the hunter who shot a deer and mysteriously injured Julia, Fefu now shoots a rabbit and Julia once more suffers the wound, which this time may be fatal (59-61).

Beverley Byers Pevitts has argued that the death of Julia signifies the symbolic killing off of woman as created by the dominant culture in order to enable the emergence of a new self-determined female identity,¹⁴ yet Fornes's assertion that her characters should not be seen as symbolic or representative figures makes Pevitts's positive interpretation of the ambiguous ending of Fefu and Her Friends problematic.¹⁵ With regard to this question of the play's ending, Fornes's starting premises for her work on Fefu may perhaps be instructive. By her own account, she began writing the play with two "fantasy" images in mind. The first image was of a "woman … who was talking to some friends [and then] took her rifle and shot her husband"; the second was a joke involving"two Mexicans speaking at a bullfight. One says to the other, 'She is pretty, that one over there.' The other one says,'Which one?' So the first one takes his rifle and shoots her. He says, 'That one, the one that falls.'"¹⁶ In the completed play, Fornes has brought these two starting premises together so that, however indirectly, Fefu shoots Julia rather than her husband Phillip and, in doing so, takes the place of the men in the "joke" who objectify women to the point of annihilation. Notably, in Part One of the play, Julia remarks of Fefu's use of the gun, "She's hurting herself (22); inasmuch as taking up the gun is a male-associated strategy of domination, Julia's observation is correct.¹⁷ In this Lehrstiick, then, Fefu's male-identification is ultimately as self-destructive and ineffectual a strategy of resistance to women's subordination within patriarchal culture as Julia's hysteria.

After Fefu and Julia, the actress-educator character Emma may be of greatest significance in the play, her metatheatrical status serving to call attention to the transformative potential of performance that Fornes herself explores through her mise-en-scène. Emma's somewhat comical admission to Fefu that she "think[s] about genitals all the time" and that she is amazed that "people act as if they don't have genitals" (27) may signify an intuitive awareness on her part of the operation of a sex/gender system that naturalizes culturally constructed gender norms by obscuring their superimposition on sexed bodies, yet her involvement in the struggle that is at the heart of the play is less explicit and direct than that of either of the two main characters. Subsequent to their discussion of genitals, Fefu confides to Emma that she is living in a frightening state of "constant pain" that is "not physical" and is "not sorrow" (29) but that is threatening to overwhelm her. She associates this pain with a black stray cat that has been "coming to [her] kitchen":

He's awfully mangled and big. He is missing an eye and his skin is diseased. At first I was repelled by him, but then, I thought, this is a monster that has been sent to me and I must feed him. And I fed him. One day he came and shat all over my kitchen. Foul diarrhoea. He still comes and I still feed him.—I am afraid of him.

(29)

Left alone on stage, Emma responds to this story by "impmvis[ing] an effigy of Fefu" and reciting before it Shakespeare's Sonnet 14:

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck.
And yet methinks I have astronomy;
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By oft predict that I in heaven find. .
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert:
Or else of thee this I prognosticate,
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
                                                           (29)

Through this brief performance, Emma attempts to counteract Fefu's superstitiously passive submission to the black cat as an ominous manifestation of some negative external force that has control over her fortunes, reciting Shakespeare's words to assert Fefu's own power to transform the world outside herself actively by using her inner resources to reproduce in it her own version of reality. Emma thus introduces performance as a potentially constructive mode of response to the forces that oppress Fefu and that she accepts as her lot in her own form of paralysis; for as Assunta Kent has pointed out, Fefu's unwillingness "to risk losing all the old familiar constraints and habits"—her dependence on a husband who finds her and all women "loathsome"—is ultimately as crippling as Julia's hysteria, "[reducing Fefu's] potentially revolutionary ideas to shocking comments" and "[making] a game of her hostility toward her distant husband."¹⁸

Emma's views on the transformative potential of performance are clarified through her dramatization in Part Three of an extraordinary and mystical passage from a 1917 book by Emma Sheridan Fry entitled Educational Dramatics (Fefu, n 46). In this passage, Fry argues that instead of shutting ourselves off from the vast realm of experience that the forces of "[e]nvironment" represent as they seek entry into our beings, we should embrace these forces, confident in the knowledge "that 'all' is ours, and that whatever anyone has ever known, or may ever have or know, we will call and claim." According to Fry, we are "[a] creation of God's consciousness coming now slowly and painfully into recognition of ourselves," and "[civilization" is as yet "[a] circumscribed order in which the whole has not entered." In meeting Environment as "our true mate that clamors for our reunion,"

[we] will seize all, learn all, know all here, that we may fare further on the great quest! The task of Now is only a step toward the task of the Whole! Let us then seek the laws governing real life forces, that coming into their own, they may create, develop and reconstruct. Let us awaken life dormant! Let us, boldly, seizing the star of our intent, lift it as the lantern of our necessity, and let it shine over the darkness of our compliance.

(47-8)

Notably, the first name of Fornes's actress-character echoes that of the author of this passage, yet her last name is given as Blake so that she cannot be interpreted as a fictionalized version of Fry (46). Through her performance of Fry's text, then, Emma exemplifies the active response to the environment that Fry proposes, taking the text into herself yet at the same time transforming it so that its call for a subject who will break out of a socially conditioned and compliant relation to a male-personified environment in order to come to a new state of consciousness resonates with the feminist thematics that underlie Fornes's play, where the two main characters are in different ways paralyzed by internalized oppression.¹⁹

The performance model that Emma advocates and enacts through her representation of Fry's text is analogous to Fornes's mise-en-scène, and this analogy in turn casts the mise-en-scène in implicitly feminist terms. Feminist performance theorists such as Jill Dolan and Elin Diamond have drawn on the work of film theorist Laura Mulvey to argue that women traditionally have been positioned as objects of the male gaze in theatrical representation.²⁰ However, while Fornes's images of the man at the bullfight who identifies the woman he desires by gunning her down suggests a fundamental resistance to this objectifying male gaze, W.B. Worthen's reading of Fefu and Her Friends as a critique of "the gender dynamics implicit in the realistic perspective" in which Fornes "unseat[s] the spectator of 'realism'" in order to "dramatiz[e] 'his' controlling authority over the construction of stage gender" is more problematic.²¹ More specifically, Worthen's argument relies on the notion that "[t]he action of [the play] takes place under the watchful eyes of Phillip, of the hunter, of Julia's 'guardians,'" as well as of the spectator, who, as yet "another invisible voyeur," is aligned with Julia's "unseen, coercive tormentors."²² In endowing non-characters with offstage dramatic presence in order to consider how Fornes deconstructs the role of the spectator in realism, Worthen shifts his focus away from the characters onstage and, in doing so, neglects to take fully into account how Emma's metatheatrical discourse advocating an active new relation to the environment applies to Fornes's reconstruction of the spectator that she brings into the world of the play.²³

Fornes has stated of Fefu and Her Friends that she "expected that the audience would feel as if they are really visiting people in their house,"²⁴ but the "nice middle-class girls from Connecticut"²⁵ who in this sense play hostess to the audience defy conventional representations of femininity by setting the terms of their guests' entertainment.

Thus, the simultaneous staging and sound spill in Part Two provide spectators with a theatrical experience that corresponds with the characters' own experience of the intrusion into consciousness of critical feminist insights. Moreover, spectators drawn deliberately into the world of the play are cast less as Julia's judges, as Worthen has argued, than as her confidants, the community she feels she needs to join with her in hallucinating if she is to avoid "perishing" (44). Cecilia says at the beginning of Part Three of Fefu, "We cannot survive in a vacuum. We must be part of a community, perhaps 10, 100, 1000"; notably, it is Fefu's refusal to enter into Julia's hallucinatory world to see what it is she sees that causes her to fire her fatal shot and thereby to replicate the man in the joke that was the starting premise for the play. Working against objectification through her reconfiguration of the actor/spectator relationship and her manipulation of aesthetic distance, Fornes fosters community by facilitating identification. At the same time, however, she insists on the need to recognize difference within community by representing multiple and simultaneous perspectives on—and/or versions of—the action in Part Two. As Cecilia concludes, "the concern of the educator [is] to teach how to be sensitive to the differences in ourselves as well as outside ourselves, not to supervise the memorization of facts. [ … ] Otherwise the unusual in us will perish. As we grow we feel we are strange and fear any thought that is not shared with everyone" (44).

Fornes's mise-en-scène literalizes philosopher Maria Lugones's metaphor of "'world'-travelling" as the process by which identification—and therefore identity—is constituted. "[T]he failure to identify" is, for Lugones, "the failure to see oneself in [others] who are quite different from oneself."²⁶ Describing her own experience of alienation from her mother, Lugones recalls the necessity of ceasing to see "through arrogant eyes":

Loving my mother also required that I see with her eyes, that I go into my mother's world, that I see both of us as we are constructed in her world, that I witness her own sense of herself from within her world. Only . through this travelling to her "world" could I identify with her because only then could I cease to ignore her and to be excluded and separate from her. Only then could I see her as a subject even if one subjected and only then could I see how meaning could arise fully between us.²⁷

As Lugones concludes, "travelling to someone's 'world' is a way of identifying with them … because by travelling to their 'world' we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes. Only when we have travelled to each other's 'worlds' are we fully subjects to each other."²⁸ The identification process that Lugones is concerned with "is of great interest" to Fornes as well; as she has rather amusingly stated,

it is through identification that we learn to become whole human beings… .

[If] we do not allow our imagination to receive the experiences of others because they are of a différent gender, we will shrivel and decay, and our spirit will become a dry prune and we will become ill and die and we will not go to heaven because in heaven they do not allow dry prunes.²⁹

Elin Diamond has pointed out that the process of identification that is constitutive of identity implies at the same time transformation of the self by the other and is thus radically destabilizing, so that "[t]he humanist notion of identity as a model that the self enacts over time—that is unique, unified, coherent, and consistent—is belied precisely by the temporality, the specific historicity of the identification process."³⁰ In the production of Fefu at the American Place Theatre in 1978, after moving audience members into the world of the characters in Part Two, Fornes returned mem to seats other than those that they had occupied at the start of the play,³¹ a literal shifting suggestive of the transformative potential that Diamond maintains is inherent in the act of identification that Lugones calls "world-travelling."

I have argued that the metatheatrical dimensions of Fefu and Her Friends implicate Fornes's mise-en-scène as a constructive response to the feminist problematics mat generate the play's action.³² Fornes's own account of the reception of the 1978 production indicates the tenacity of conventional identification patterns, however, and raises questions about the effectiveness of Fefu and Her Friends as feminist theatre. As Fornes recalls, "a lot of the men" who stayed on for post-show discussions at the American Place Theatre

wanted to know where the men in the play were; they wanted to know whether the women were married. They insisted on relating to the men in this play, which had no male characters. If the name of a man was mentioned that was the person they wanted to identify with. There was a man who thought the play was about Phillip (he is the husband of the central character and he never appears on stage nor is he very much talked about).³³

There is a Utopian quality to the metatheatrical character Emma's envisioning of the total integration of subject and environment in a less "circumscribed" civilization of the future, and the failure of identification evident in Fornes's account of the early reception of Fefu and Her Friends suggests that, like the feminist critical writing that Tania Modleski has described, the play mat was first staged in 1977 and that is now a foundational text in feminist theatre was "simultaneously performative and Utopian, pointing toward the freer world it [was] in the process of inaugurating."³⁴ 1 will close, then, by reiterating Emma's statement on the potential of theatre to effect social transformation: "Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we're showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre" (22, emphasis added).

Notes

¹Maria Irene Fornes, "Seeing with Clarity: The Visions of Maria Irene Fornes," interview by Scott Cummings, Theater (Yale), 17:1 (1985), 52.

²Ibid.

³Maria Irene Fornes, interview, in Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig (New York, 1987), 159.

⁴Fornes, "Seeing with Clarity," 52. See note 1.

⁵Maria Irene Fornes, interview, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights, by David Savran (New York, 1988), 60. Fornes states in this interview that she finished writing Fefu and Her Friends only three days before the show opened (60).

⁶Maria Irene Fornés, "'I write these messages that come,'" The Drama Review 21:4 (1977), 35-7. [Following her first published anthology Fornes has dropped the use of accents in the name.]

⁷Ibid., 37-8.

⁸Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends (New York, 1978), 22. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

⁹Elaine Showalter has noted that many turn-of-the-century female psychiatric patients were better educated and more intellectual than was customary for women of their day and that their unconventionality in this respect was perceived by male doctors to be related to their disorders. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York, 1985), 145-64.

¹⁰'"Maria Irene Fornes, interview by Bonnie Marranea, Performing Arts Journal 2:3 (1978), 107.

¹¹Maria Irene Fornes, interview by Allen Frame, Bomb: A Tri Quarterly on Art, Fiction, Theatre and Film, 10 (Fall 1984), 28; W.B. Worthen, "Still Playing Games: Ideology and Performance in the Theater of Maria Irene Fornes," in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater (New York, 1989), 177.

¹²Showalter, 161. See note 9.

¹³Bonnie Marranea, "The State of Grace: Maria Irene Fornes at Sixty-Two," Performing Arts Journal, 14:2 (1992), 25.

¹⁴Beverley Byers Pevitts, "Fefu and Her Friends," Women in American Theatre: Careers, Images, Movements: An Illustrated Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York, 1981), 318-19.

¹⁵See Fornes, interview by Marranea, 106. See note 10. For a similar critique of Pevitts's interpretation, see Assunta Bartolomucci Kent, Maria Irene Fomes and Her Critics (Westport, CT, 1996) 126-66. My analysis of Fefu shares several points of convergence with Kent's but differs in its emphasis on metatheatricality and mise-en-scène.

¹⁶Fornes, "'I write these messages,'" 30. See note 5. In a panel discussion published as "Women in the Theatre" in Centerpoint: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 3:3-4 (1980), Fornes further stated, "I started [Fefu and Her Friends] because I had six dresses that I bought in a thrift shop, 1930s dresses, chiffon, lovely. I wanted to write a play about women so I could use these dresses. But the dresses were never used for this production; they were used for another one. So, the play started as one about women" (36).

¹⁷On this point of the gun, it may be worth noting that, according to David Savran, the only play that Fornes had read up to the time she wrote her first play Tango Palace was Ibsen's Hedda Gabier. See Savran, introduction to Fornes, interview, In Their Own Words, 51. See note 5. The title character commits suicide with the gun she has inherited from her father General Gabier. Hedda's death is the result of two contradictory aspects of a patriarchal legacy that has unsuited her for conventional feminine roles but has at the same time left her unable to envision for herself a viable alternative.

¹⁸Kent, 131. See note 15.

¹⁹While my analysis focuses on Julia, Fefu, and Emma, the metaphor of paralysis may also be extended to the other characters in the play. Worthen 176, see note 11; Kent 144, see note 15; and Deborah R. Geis, "Wordscapes of the Body: Performative Language as Gestus in Maria Irene Fornes's Plays," Theatre Journal, 42:3 (1990), 297.

²⁰Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York, 1984) 361-73; Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, 1988) and "Desire Cloaked in a Trenchcoat," Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor, 1993) 121-34; and Elin Diamond, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism," TDR, 32:1 (1988), 83, 89.

²¹Worthen, 175. See note 11.

²²Worthen, 177, 179. See note 11.

²³For a related critique of Worthen's analysis, see Kent 134-36. See note 15.

²⁴Fornes, interview by Marranea, 108. See note 10.

²⁵Fornes, interview, in Contemporary Women Playwrights. See note 3.

²⁶Marfa Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception," Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco, 1990), 393.

²⁷Ibid., 394.

²⁸Ibid., 401.

²⁹Maria Irene Fomes, "The 'Woman' Playwright Issue," ed. Gayle Austin, Performing Arts Journal 7:3 (1983), 90.

³⁰Elin Diamond, "The Violence of 'We': Politicizing Identification," Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor, 1992), 396.

³¹See Walter Kerr, "Two Plays Swamped by Metaphors," review of Fefu and Her Friends at the American Place, New York Times (22 January 1978), D3.

³²My argument is perhaps further substantiated by the fact that, according to Assunta Kent, the characters and "interpersonal dynamics" depicted in Fefu were "based in part" on Fornes's observations of the "short-lived" Women's Theater Council, which she co-founded with avant-garde women theatre artists Megan Terry, Rosalyn Drexler, Rochelle Owens, Julie Bovasso, and Adrienne Kennedy (121, 114, 211). See note 15.

³³Fornes, "'Woman' Playwright Issue," 90-1. See note 29.

³⁴Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York, 1991), 48.