Fefu and Her Friends

Near the end of Part 1, Emma states, “Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we’re showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre” (22). Although Emma lives her life more dramatically than the other women, this assertion does not simply pertain to her personal philosophy. First, it’s a meta-theatrical statement that refers to how the play itself works through questions about social expectations and unpacks the way gender roles harm and even kill women. The performances of womanhood and femininity continue to be oppressive, even when a woman is in her own home or among other women.

The play turns the domestic sphere, which is meant to be private, into a performance space, putting these women on display even in personal moments. This effect is emphasized in Part 2 when the audience is forced to travel from room to room and remember that they are taking part in a performance. They aren’t allowed to become engrossed as a passive observer. The women in the play also perform for each other, frequently expressing themselves through monologues rather than discussions. They put up fronts to perform propriety or mask their emotions and pain.

Additionally, the cause that the women are fundraising to support, while not expressly explained, seems to be related to supporting theatre education for children. In Emma’s speech, she describes how society constantly hammers people into conforming, but that theatre is a way to rediscover oneself and become more sensitive and responsive to the world. Theater is a method of discovering one’s uniqueness, and teaching theater to children leads them to be less constricted from a young age.

The women in the play are pressured in various ways to conform to social gender roles, and they comply at different levels. Fefu attempts to reject her role as a woman, taking on traits and tasks that are traditionally masculine. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Christina is heavily invested in her own conformity as a woman, to the point that Fefu’s rebellion against gender roles makes her feel threatened and uncomfortable. As Fefu explains in Part 1, women are only given safety if they forfeit their spirit and identity. In Part 3, the women discuss how young women at their college were pathologized and forced into therapy for being outstanding or asserting their intelligence.

Julia was once a confident and unstoppable woman who asserted herself, but was pressed into conformity and passivity, which for her manifests as a physical disability. The stakes of conformity are high, but the women are punished both for failing to conform, as with the women in college, and for agreeing to conform, as with Julia who goes insane and hallucinates. The only way a woman can escape either psychosis or the accusation of psychosis is to truly believe that women should be limited and contained. As Julia describes, the judges have told her that the only way she can stop hallucinating is to forget that they exist—something that other women have managed to do.

In Part 2, Emma muses on the fact that everyone has genitals, and yet they continue with their lives without ever mentioning them, acting in public as if they do not have them. Although genitalia are private, they dictate how a person is gendered and how they are treated in public. The play takes place in Fefu’s home, a private, domestic space in which the feminine is relegated. And yet the act of performing a play makes the space public. The women continue to perform for themselves and each other.