Fefu and Her Friends

Fefu and her Friends is a play by Cuban American playwright Maria Irene Fornés. It premiered in 1977 at the Relativity Media Lab, a small venue on New York’s Lower East Side. Set in 1935 New England, the play concerns a group of women who knew one another in college and gather for a reunion as adults. Within six months, Fefu was produced off-Broadway at the American Place Theatre, earning Fornés her second Obie Award. Over the course of Fornés’s career as a playwright, spanning about forty years between the early 1960s and 2001, she wrote about fifty plays and was a pioneer in the US avant-garde theatre movement. Fefu is one of her most well-known plays and has been lauded as a seminal text in feminist theater and a significant part of the American theater canon in the 20th century.

Fornés explained that she was inspired to write Fefu and her Friends by an old Mexican joke. Two men are at a bullfight, and one comments to the other about an attractive woman. The other asks which woman he is talking about and the first points his gun, shoots, and replies, “That one.” Fefu’s all-woman cast places all of the male characters offstage, highlighting the ways that each woman in the play is controlled and damaged by patriarchal society and the constriction of gender roles. Fefu and her Friends investigates the way oppression affects these women’s lives and their relationships with one another.

Plot Summary

Fefu and her Friends is divided into three parts. In 1935, eight women gather in the home of Stephany Beckmann, known by the nickname Fefu. Part 1 occurs in the living room, and at the beginning of the play, Christina and Cindy, the first guests, are shocked when Fefu uses a rifle to shoot at her husband in the backyard. Fefu reassures her friends that this is just a game that they play in their marriage and that the bullets are blanks. Ominously, Fefu points out that her husband jokes about replacing the blanks with real bullets. The rest of the women arrive, including Julia, who is in a wheelchair after a mysterious hunting accident, followed by Emma, Paula, Sue, and Cecilia.

In Part 2, four scenes occur simultaneously. Emma and Fefu are on the lawn discussing heaven, hell, and genitals. In the study, Cindy and Christina talk about love, and Cindy recounts a disturbing nightmare. Alone in her bedroom, Julia hallucinates about invisible judges who allowed her to live through her accident but only under certain conditions. In exchange for her life, the judges force her to accept her role as a subordinate woman in a patriarchal society while refusing to acknowledge that a patriarchy exists. Finally, in the kitchen, Paula and Cecilia rehash their love affair, which came to a painful end.

Part 3 returns to the living room where the women plan a fundraiser performance. At the end of the play, Fefu shoots at a rabbit, expecting the gun to be full of blanks as always. This time, the gun shoots real bullets, killing the rabbit. As this occurs, Julia’s head falls back bleeding, mimicking the hunting accident that put her in a wheelchair but perhaps killing her this time.