Theater Review - Around the house

Actor’s Express stages enigmatic Fefu

Actor’s Express’ latest production takes place not only on the theater’s stage, but behind and around it as well. Irene Maria Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends depicts a gathering of eight women at a large New England mansion, and the middle act consists of four scenes held at separate places in the facility. The audience divides into four groups, files through the theater and watches each episode in turn.

Thus the entrance to the theater doubles as the lawn, a storage room, a study, etc. It’s a gimmicky device, but it puts an interesting spin on the notion of the “fourth wall” of a performing space, as well as offering a fun tour of the playhouse’s backstage area. But mostly, it’s like being on a scavenger hunt, only the object of the game isn’t to find a physical prize, but the meaning of the play itself.

Fefu and Her Friends, written in 1977 and only now having its Southeastern professional premiere, is not a play that’s easily puzzled out. In exploring the ways women see themselves and how they believe men see them, Fornes shows little concern for adhering to narrative rules or meeting audience expectations. Fornes’ Fefu is driven not by plot, but an odd combination of cheerful party dynamics and deeper, darker forces, and its scenes can please or provoke, but rarely fully satisfy.

Fefu (Patricia French) plays host to seven friends in 1935 for a meal and a politically motivated meeting. Aggressively nonconformist, she’s prone to outlandish remarks and behavior, like firing at her off-stage husband with a rifle that may or may not contain a blank cartridge. Of the other women, some are longtime companions, some are strangers with shared beliefs. The most unsettling character is Julia (Jennifer Levison), confined to a wheelchair having suffered spinal damage — and lingering delusions — after a hunting accident.

The first and third acts, each roughly a half-hour, take place on Rochelle Barker’s cozily realistic set, and show the women first coming together, and later holding their meeting and clowning around. For the middle sequence, director Wier Harman largely succeeds with the striking logistic feat of having four scenes happening simultaneously, with some women leaving one scene to appear in another. You can even overhear scenes from different rooms, like the events of an actual party.

With a diverse group of people spending time at a manor house, Fefu superficially resembles Love! Valour! Compassion! and other plays inspired by Chekhov’s leisurely melancholy. But plays of the Chekhov model tend to focus on the relationships between the characters, and Fefu is far less overt. The most affecting moments involve Paula (Joanna Daniel) and Cecilia (Shelby Hofer), whom we realize are former lovers. Paula explains her theory that love affairs last exactly seven years and three months, and in such moments, we can identify with the two women’s mixed feelings for each other. Though we recognize how close the other women are, we rarely feel so intimate with them.

Instead, Fefu is driven more by ideas, from such comical observations as Emma’s (Brenda Porter) “Do you think about genitals all the time?” to her more flamboyant lecture on surroundings and the senses. While Emma’s speech nods back to the audience’s exploration of the theater’s environment, its greater meaning I confess was lost on me.

But primarily, Fefu explores feminist matters, and though it takes place in Eleanor Roosevelt’s time and remains timely today, it mostly suits the climate of the 1970s, the era of the Equal Rights Amendment and NOW. Fefu observes that men feel safer in each other’s company than with women, while Julia has a soliloquy in the “bedroom” that recounts a paranoid hallucination of male persecution. She voices such misogynistic rhetoric that it suggests either female self-loathing or a powerful resentment of men.

The different members of the cast get many charming moments, like the way Sandra Benton examines homemade popsicles in the kitchen, or how Kathleen Wattis smokes a cigar like she’s sampling some forbidden fruit. Hope Mirlis meets French’s sunny, life-of-the-party antics with an amusingly flat gaze of consternation. Porter suits Emma’s role as the spiritual guru of the group, but Levison’s performance keeps Julia’s wounded qualities opaque to us.

Fefu and Her Friends ends with a heavily symbolic act of violence that can be interpreted as a kind of murder or euthanasia. The climax, like the rest of the play, comes across as the kind of evocative art that has no “wrong” interpretation. The performances and theatrical effects can be enjoyed at face value, but trying to figure Fefu feels like the kind of game where you can’t lose, but you can’t win either.

Fefu and Her Friends plays through April 21 at Actor’s Express, King Plow Arts Center, 887 W. Marietta St., with performances at 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. and 7 p.m. Sun. $20-$25. Call 404-607-7469.??