Riverside Theatre staging ‘groundbreaking’ play

“Fefu and Her Friends” requires a flexible playing space and a flexible audience — both of which you’ll find at Riverside Theatre in Iowa City.

This groundbreaking play, written by the late Cuban-born playwright Maria Irene Fornes, takes viewers through an afternoon and evening in 1930s New England, when eight society women gather at Fefu’s house to plan a fundraiser for education.

The action begins in the main theater space, with audience members in their assigned seats. For Part 2, they will be divided into four small groups, each traveling to four different spaces within the theater to watch the scenes unfold simultaneously. So each group will view the scenes in a different order. Afterward, they will return to the main playing space to see the play’s conclusion.

If you go

What: “Fefu and Her Friends”

Where: Riverside Theatre, 119 E. College St., Iowa City

When: March 10 to April 2, 2023; 7:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $15 to $40, Riverside Box Office, (319) 259-7099 or riversidetheatre.org/fefu/

Audience Notes: Appropriate for older teens and adults. Also, in Part 2, as intended by the author, the audience will leave their assigned seats and be ushered to nearby locations within the theater to experience four separate scenes in smaller groups. Each space will be seated and ADA accessible. House staff will be available to assist patrons at all locations. Audiences will return to their assigned seats for the conclusion of the play.

Post-show talkbacks: March 12 with the director, cast and Miriam Gilbert; March 26 with University of Iowa Professor Jen Buckley and director Juliana Frey-Mendez

“(It’s) a play about what happens and what is possible when women come together in a world that is trying to keep them apart,” said guest director Juliana Frey-Mendez, 33, an Iowa City native now living in Columbia, Mo.

One of the play’s tag lines is: “Revolutions start when women come together.”

“The truly revolutionary part is the intimacy that the audience has, where they’re put in a place to listen and believe the words that women say,” Frey-Mendez said. “There are things in this play that give us a clue that this world is not like ours. And if we are believing everything that these women say, we sort of understand how their world is different than ours. But it’s also, I think, really easy to dismiss women nowadays, because their truths are too devastating.”

Also described as “a seminal play of the 20th century,” the piece helped establish Fornes as a leading figure in the Off-Off Broadway experimental theater scene.

“It’s the first play of its kind that falls under the category of what we now call site-specific performance, or promenade theater,” Frey-Mendez said. “Site-specific being the area where the theater is performed influences what is being performed, and promenade is where the audience is moving from location to location, right? I think about ladies in cotillion dresses doing the promenade to be seen.”

Fornes began writing the play in 1964, set it aside, then picked it back up and finished it in 1977. And when she saw the space where it was to premiere, “she was taken aback,” Frey-Mendez said.

But when the playwright went backstage and saw the dressing room, she thought that could serve as one of the rooms in Fefu’s house, and the theater’s office could serve as the study. So she rewrote the second part to rotate the audience in and out of other, unconventional spaces in which the action could unfold.

“So from a form standpoint, it is innovative. And then from a plot standpoint, it is also innovative,” Frey-Mendez said.

“ … She's really interested in giving the audience some building blocks, some puzzle pieces that might not linearly go together, but they kind of have to figure out what is happening,” Frey-Mendez added. “I think our audience is really going to have to come with their open, curious minds to try and solve the mysteries.”

Adam Knight, Riverside Theatre’s producing artistic director, likens this experience to a kind of theatrical cubism.

“Whereas instead of showing one narrative arc, we see the underbelly of this world. We see the private conversations happening in a study, in the garden, in the kitchen. We see events that take place in one of the women's bedrooms that she's staying in,” he said.

“And so what I think Fornes is getting at, is in a public sphere, there’s all these intimate spheres that inform our understanding of it, inform the actions of the characters and give the audience a chance to fully experience the world. …

“Because in this play, and I think in the world really, environment is a character. Environment informs things. What we say in a public sphere is different than what we say in an intimate sphere. And I think this plays getting at that,” Knight said.

“Particularly when it comes to the lives of women during this time period, there was the sense that women had to act a certain way and dress a certain way — this idea of decorum that was prevalent throughout society, but particularly for women.

“Even the idea of education, finishing school, and the idea of going to go to a proper university was still fairly new, and a lot of these characters didn’t know each other from college. And so they’re at this kind of forefront of this change that’s happening in women’s education,” he said.

But Fefu, short for Stephany, is not an earth mother shepherding her flock through a changing landscape.

“She’s the center of her social circle,” Knight said. “Even from the beginning of the play, we see that she’s very unconventional in her ways. The way that she talks, the way that her relationship that she describes with her husband seems to scare some newbies to the circle, but also inspires those who have been a part of this world longer.”

Collectively, they’re “concerned about their place in society,” Frey-Mendez said. “Their fundamental fear is they’re worried about going crazy and are worried about being seen as crazy. And so this fight of the women versus society is really about (how) the women's desires and shames and dreams could be the cause of them going crazy.”

It was written “during a time of incredible upheaval, particularly around the Women’s Liberation Movement,” Frey-Mendez noted. “ … I think that ultimately this play is about anyone, but particularly a woman's right to have agency over not just their body, but also their spirit and their soul.”

Iowa City ties

Both director Frey-Mendez and playwright Fornes have local ties. Not only did Frey-Mendez grow up in Iowa City, but Fornes was in residency at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1993-94.

Frey-Mendez worked at Riverside Theatre’s former Gilbert Street space, as an assistant director and stage manager, and also worked at Riverside’s outdoor Festival Stage in Lower City Park.

“I think one of the things that I have as a challenge, but it's also really exciting, is that this is my first time directing in the new Riverside Theatre space,” Frey-Mendez said.

Considering the various spaces and drawing the audience into those intimate spaces with sometimes “vastly different” seating configurations makes her think differently about sightlines and angles for the stage pictures. This takes her back to the days before graduate school, when she did more site-specific plays.

“I'm going back to my roots in a way. Going back to the skills to put on this show,” she said, “which is also going back to my roots and coming back to my hometown.”

“Fefu and Her Friends” also is near to her heart.

Although Frey-Mendez never met Fornes, she considers her “my artistic godmother,” and has become a Fornes scholar. Frey-Mendez also is a member of the Fornes Institute, which is “trying to amplify and uplift her legacy, to put her on more curricula, get her work on more stages and bring her into the conversation,” she said.

Frey-Mendez’s mother is from Cuba, so she also shares cultural roots with Fornes, who was born in Havana in 1930 and moved to New York City in 1945. During the course of her career, Fornes wrote 40 plays, with her first, “Tango Palace,” produced in 1963.

Her award-winning body of works explored diverse cultures, strong women, linguistics and experimental formats, and she was a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “And What of the Night?”

Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2005, Fornes died in a Manhattan care facility in 2018 at age 88. A documentary, “The Rest I Make Up,” looks at her creative life after she stopped writing.

Yet, her name is not well known, which Frey-Mendez attributes to the way Fornes focused on experimental works, then switched to mentoring and training playwrights.

The Celebrando Fornes project hopes to elevate her profile for students and audiences. By staging “Fefu and Her Friends,” Riverside Theatre is participating in the celebration which culminates in 2030, the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth. The Fornes Institute put out a call to U.S. theaters, colleges and universities to stage plays, workshops, readings, panel discussions, and add her works to their curriculum.

“This production will be documented in a way that might be useful to future productions and scholars,” Knight said. “For me, bring Juliana back is a wonderful homecoming. Not only do we have the perfect director for the play, we also have the perfect director for Riverside. I love this opportunity for a homecoming.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com