THE NEWYORKER, DECEMBER 16, 2019 79
ensemble, dressed like a vaguely radical
street gang—Doc Martens, sheer shirts,
pointless vests—dances around the main
characters at odd moments, adding wel
come movement at the expense of co
hesion. A series of panels meant to sug
gest the siding of a suburban house, but
a bit too reminiscent of an aisle in Home
Depot, glides around the stage, fram
ing scene after scene.
To the extent that one theme pre
dominates, it is a worthy one: the inner
lives and imperilled freedom of women.
This rhymes, in a way, with Morissette’s
work. But the show’s insistence on mak
ing its story ever bigger, broader, and
more inclusive—perhaps an effect of
anxiety about the size of the Broadway
stage—leaves each of its women under
described and essentially unknown.
The most powerful moment of the
show comes when the focus is whittled
down to one: Frankie’s best friend and
occasional makeout partner, Jo (Lau
ren Patten), who finds out that Frankie
has fallen in love with a new boy at school,
Phoenix (Antonio Cipriano), and gives
a galvanizing rendition of “You Oughta
Know.” When I saw the show, Patten—a
great singer—brought the house down.
It was possible to imagine, for a moment,
an entire story told through Jo’s eyes, and
what a howl such a show might make.N
ow try this for a portrait. A woman
with a short bob, wearing welltai
lored trousers and a fitted vest, picks up
a rifle, aims it out the window at her
lawn, stretches to her full, formidable
height, and takes her best shot. Her
name is Fefu (Amelia Workman), and
the gun is pointed at her husband, who
never shows up onstage. This is a game
they play: before Fefu fires, her husband
fills the gun’s chamber, never telling Fefu
whether any of the bullets isn’t a blank.
So goes the perilous game of chaining
and dependency in marriage; and such,
in its violence and whimsy, is the experi
ence of watching “Fefu and Her Friends,”
by the late María Irene Fornés, directed
by Lileana BlainCruz, at Theatre for
a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare
Center, in the play’s first Off Broadway
revival since its première, in 1977.
Fefu, so real and electrically idiosyn
cratic that she might at any moment
up and leave the theatre, stroll down
Fulton Street, and start apartment hunting in Fort Greene, has invited a group
of women to her house so that they can
run through the program of an upcom
ing educational fundraiser. Fefu’s rest
lessness and loose tongue—she claims
not to like other women—scandalize
the mousy Christina ( Juliana Canfield)
and amuse Cindy ( Jennifer Lim), a
cooler customer who’s used to Fefu’s
shtick. More friends file in, and soon
the drawing room looks fit to burst
with their hopes and secrets, hanging
before us like the armada of art on Fe
fu’s bright green wall.
The second act is a marvel. The au
dience is split into four groups, each
making its way through four parts of
Fefu’s house: the drawing room, a whim
sical kitchen, a lawn bedecked for a game
of croquet, and—thanks to a glass
floor—a dismal basement where Julia (a
brilliant, unnerving Brittany Bradford),
who’s been physically incapacitated for
reasons that are unclear to her friends,
carries on a conversation with someone
unseen. Something’s wrong down there,
and the trouble might be Fefu’s before
long. The set piece rips away the artifice
that so often congenially pillows our no
tions of theatre. As we walked around
Adam Rigg’s intricate doll house of a
set, ropes and pulleys and bits of black
tape flopped into view, and some of the
people in my group started talking about
holiday plans.
You could call this a distraction. I
wished that the wristbands that desig
nated our groups didn’t also denote which
of us could sit and which should stand.
This pageant of movement insists on a
flattening equality among the different
perspectives, and I didn’t like to be re
minded of hierarchy, which already poi
sons too many of the theatre’s trappings.
Still, I felt pleasantly plucked out of place.
“Life is theatre,” one of the women says.
And theatre, in turn, is a feverishly wall
papered funhouse version of life, whose
totality none of us can tell. Here we were,
walking the line between the two.
The otherworldly effect was this:
on the lawn (the last stop for my group),
when Fefu’s hands grazed those of her
friend Emma (Helen Cespedes)—this
play is, among other things, a map of
little erotic touches—I felt my hand
grazed, too. I left the theatre and kept
looking around corners for new sets
to discover. THE ROSE
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