Friday, July 25, 2025



Theater Spotlight: Fefu and Her Friends

Wesleyan’s upcoming production of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends will be a moving experience – literally. The performance, directed by Theater and African American Studies double major Gedney Barclay ’09, requires audience members to get out of their seats and move from room to room to see each of the play’s four simultaneously occurring scenes. Fefu, played by Ali San-Roman ’11, invites seven of her friends (Kiara Williams-Jones ’12, Emily Levine ’11, Emily Caffery ’10, Alli Rock ’10, Arielle Hixson ’11, Elissa Heller ’11, and Sarah Wolfe ’12) into her home for what starts out as a rehearsal for a fundraiser but slowly becomes something much more surreal. †Director Gedney Barclay shared some of her insights on Fefu and on directing in general.

Adrian Rothschild: Why did you decide to direct this play?

Gedney Barclay: It’s superbly crafted. There are a lot of playwrights who have a really good understanding of narrative, or language, or character, or themes, or performativity, but they can rarely bring these elements together as seamlessly as Fornes does in this play. It’s like Beckett in that way: Fornes isn’t as controlling over the text and the stage direction; her work is more delicate than that. But in Fefu she has written an event with a meticulous attention to depth and detail that I find is generally unmatched, even by the rest of her own work.

AR: What major issues or themes are addressed in the play?†

GB: With Fornes, that’s always a loaded question. †She was very frustrated by a lot of labels or meanings or messages that critics or audiences ascribed to her work. Broadly, this play deals with a discord between our interior and exterior selves, and particularly how that confrontation manifests itself in women.

AR: How does this play relate to your thesis project?

GB: I’ve always been interested in the performativity of acts of violence, and how violence is presented in performance.† Fefu, in a somewhat discrete way, proposes various models for how violence can or should function in societies. Does it in fact lead to the creation of communities? Or does it tear them apart? Can the same act of violence do both?

AR: Does the finished production differ in any way from your initial vision or impression of the text?†

GB: Yes and no. When I first read a play, I just get impressions of the scenes, and as a reader I read in tones. So one part seems light, one somber, one pensive, one choppy. Some even have colors or tactile sensations associated with them. The best part about rehearsing a performance is that the live bodies and impulses of your actors demolish those broad readings of tone so that each moment has its own contours and nuances, and these contours bring out more possible meanings than one could ever find just by reading the text.†

AR: Were there any particularly rewarding parts of working on this play?

GB: Watching the actors sink deeper and deeper into their performances. Certain moments really begin to resonate within them, and I can see them discovering things I don’t think even they could articulate. Grotowski had a great quotation about the actor using the role as a scalpel to dissect himself, and I think this play really affords the actors the opportunity to discover and to open themselves up with each rehearsal and performance.

AR: How much support have you received from the Wesleyan community throughout production?

GB: SO. MUCH. The entire Theatre Department, the entire African American Studies Department, designers, friends, actors. I don’t think I would have pulled off a project of this ambition (8 actors, alternative space, 50 pages of dense text) without so much input and support from people at Wesleyan.

AR: Sum up your views on directing in one word.

GB: I’ll go with perspicacity.†

Fefu and Her Friends goes up at 8 p.m. next Friday, February 6, with additional performances on Saturday at 5:30 and 9 p.m. and Sunday at 5:30 p.m. †It will be held in the Center for African American Studies, at 343 High St.

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