Curating Openings in the Theatre of María Irene Fornés

In this conversation, Fefu and Her Friends dramaturg Anna D. Novak and director Juliana Frey-Méndez talk about the director/dramaturg relationship and the potential within a play’s mysteries. Together they were able to build a collaborative, imaginative, process that put love at the forefront. Recorded in July 2023, the two artists reflect on their process while working on the show at Riverside Theatre in Spring 2023.

Juliana Frey-Méndez: Where do you want to start?

Anna D. Novak: I keep going back to a Fornés quote that you brought into our conversations early on: “love is paying deep attention.” I feel that just became a beacon for our process. Lately as I journal about our experience, I’ve been thinking about what it means to pay deep attention… I think through our process I maybe discovered that. I just love that quote for us. And what we did.

Juliana: I love that you brought up this quote. It seems like a strange place to start. Here we are talking about “what does collaboration between director and dramaturg look like?” Our answer: love. That quote anchored the process for me. I might not have the answer, but I can pay attention in this moment and receive it.

So, tell me a little bit about your dramaturgical journey on this show.

Anna: When I came onto the project, I was terrified: “Oh. My. God. I’m dramaturging María Irene Fornés.” You and I entered the process from different places—myself a first-time dramaturg with little Fornés exposure, and you a “Fornés Fan Girl” overflowing with ideas and context. I love that you invited me into the enigma of the play early on, which was instrumental in the pursuit of my own creative process.

Juliana: I’m remembering our first meeting: I came in hot, as I usually do, with lots of information on Fornés and so many questions about historical context. You said, “Okay. Here is what I'm gonna focus on first.” You took the unknowns of the play and my curiosities and charted a path for yourself. From the first meeting, it was clear you wanted to make something useful for the actors.

Anna: This is a big show dramaturgically, due to the importance of both when Fornés wrote it (1970s), but also when she sets the play (1930s), and even her characters illuminate a long line toward the women who have come before them! I posed the idea of creating “pillars of our world” to help organize all the work we were embarking on. The first pillars were trying to uncover who these women were: this included the history of societal etiquette for women, the history of women's higher education, and other period-specific experiences that would have influenced our character’s lives.

Juliana: And you sharing this initial research proposed solutions to one of the central mysteries of the play: how do these women know each other? Your willingness to follow your curiosities was essential to crafting the world we needed to enter.

Anna: The mystery that we were solving was not centered around finding factual, historical answers. We weren’t just interested in what these women would have been doing. At its core, this play is about the way these women feel/endure their experiences and how they respond and transform, so the research needed to mirror that.

Juliana: What did that deeper research process look like?

Anna: I searched for first-hand accounts from public sources such as newspapers and personal diaries. I was adamant that I had as many pieces of research written by women of that period that I did from women today talking about women in that period. Nothing in Fornés is ever unintentional. The great mysteries behind each of the eight women hold a lifetime of divergent experiences and knowledge that make Fefu and Her Friends so incredibly unique and truthful.

Juliana: Yes! Your discovery of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, for example, who was a trailblazing advocate for women’s education reform, was so key to unlocking my understanding of Cecilia.

Reading Mitchell’s accounts of the treatment she received as a young woman at Radcliffe College and her difficult professional journey helped me envision a specific backstory for our Cecilia.

Anna: Absolutely! It was through meeting Sprague Mitchell that we really began to uncover the higher education “purgatory” that women of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century experienced. Many of the characters in Fefu are painfully orienting themselves in the eerie liminal space of their personal and social history. Women’s higher education was quite green at the turn of the century, and though new opportunities were emerging, oppressive social expectations were not faltering. Higher education was even more restrictive for women of color, who were often alienated from their white classmates and offered significantly less opportunities to obtain degrees. While an education could be legally procured, graduates were up against constant contradictions and obstacles to succeed in the workforce afterwards. To give an example from Women and Higher Education in American History (1988): A 1931 survey of fifteen hundred school systems revealed that 77 percent refused to hire married women, while 63 percent dismissed women teachers who later married.

Juliana: And this historical research crystallized for me that the Judges are the antagonist of the play. The Judges must be real. The journey of the play is a journey of the women’s awareness of Judges’ grips on their lives.

Anna: Thank you for clearing that up—that was a big point of uncertainty for both myself and the actors, and solidifying the identity of the Judges was pivotal. We should probably get onto the glossary, or you’ll be sitting here all day while I list research at you.

Juliana: When you asked me what the glossary should look like, I sent you a “radical” example. Michelle Huynh, an amazing dramaturg at UCSD, had created a glossary like I'd never seen before. In addition to specific key words from the text, she named themes that we had discussed with the playwright, poetry, and questions to chew on. So, tell me about your glossary.

Anna: One factor that made the glossary so large was the desire to have a plethora of quite specific words to choose from. We needed more than friendship; we needed companionship, abandonment, love, trust, etc. to choose from as there were constantly different sensations entering and exiting! Inspired by Huynh’s glossary, ours featured artworks, poems, stories, reflections, and questions…beacons for each actor’s individual process of discovery.

Juliana: For example, I was really interested in uncovering more context surrounding Voltairine de Cleyre. She is mentioned by name in the play. You had sourced speeches from her work as a radical advocate for women and immigrant’s political rights. As I went down my own de Cleyre rabbit hole, I learned of her debilitating migraines, as well as a traumatic assassination attempt on her life. These were additions that I wanted to highlight for everyone, especially the actor playing Julia.

Anna: We found ourselves co-navigating an ever-weaving tapestry of feelings, ideas, and identities throughout the play. When we went to organize the research into a Google document glossary, we decided to form six groups, separated in two categories. Each group was a part of either the “Seen” or the “Unseen” category. This binary helped us categorize ideas that characters may or may not be aware of.

Juliana: This split in the glossary was helpful to underline the juxtaposition in the play for the actors. The Judges may be unseen to most but their actions have real impact on the women. The audience watches Julia hallucinate. They do not see what she sees, but it’s clearly very real to her. They have to believe that what she is seeing is, in fact, what is happening. Her perception has to supersede ours in that moment.

Anna: Yes! The groups (which correlated to parts of the body: heart, brain, etc.) outlined the physical and non-physical truths of our characters. Some of these women are in serious life transitions, some are ex-lovers, some have gone through painful and treacherous experiences that their friends may not know about.

Juliana: It was a place where we could navigate the surrealness that was happening in the play. One of the central images that I had was a photograph created by Cuban sculptor Ana Mendieta, from her Silueta series. In the image, we see the artist laying naked in a void in the ground. Her body is covered in small blooming flower cuttings. There was something about this image—a cycle of death, resurrection, suffering, pain, absolution, purification—that felt like what the women were moving through.

Anna: I’m so glad you brought up Mendieta and her siluetas, whose work, as vast and conflicting as it is, manifests as a naked imprint of her body in the earth. While it can seem very overwhelming as a concept, it’s what we do as human beings: we bring the unseen into the forefront of our mind, and we come to self-awareness. We are all on our own journey toward self-understanding on both a physical and a celestial level, and it’s centered through the physical bodies we inhabit. Sorry, I’m going way out there again!

Juliana: I live for your run on sentences! So, how did we incorporate the glossary during tablework?

It was really special to be investigating women’s histories as a group of women. 

Anna: We had a massive monitor in the space projecting our glossary (which was an ever-evolving digital document). While you and the actors ventured into the text, I followed along with the glossary posing questions, sharing ideas, and providing images to help us dissect the work more critically.

Juliana: It was really special to be investigating women’s histories as a group of women. Our stage management team, assistant director, yourself, and the cast were all women. Can you talk a little bit about the poetry packet? It was such a tender way to share your own heart with the cast. And modeled the vulnerability I was trying to set up in the room.

Anna: You shared early on that you love to engage in poetry with your actors, so I went out on a search for poems that might help us tell this story. I fell in love with the works of a collection of women poets (Georgia Douglas Johnson, Emily Dickinson, and Angelina Weld Grimké to name a few), whose artistry I cherished even more as I researched their lives (just as Irene did with her love of nostalgia). These are women who lived anywhere from the 1850s to the 1950s, and as we read their work, it was like you could see our characters. You could see Julia through these poems. You could see Fefu through these poems.

Juliana: I think it was contagious for them to see your clear labor of love—love which you put into each of the materials you made for them. The character maps you made for them feels like the other side of this coin.

Anna: To make the work as digestible as possible, I pinpointed the glossary words that both of us felt coincided most with each character and created “maps.” Each character received a personalized list of glossary terms separated into three categories: words you'll definitely want to know, words to be familiar with as they might come into play, and words that your character would be aware of. We wanted the door to be open for each artist to experience the mystery that you and I experienced as we got to know this play.

Juliana: Yes, and that they knew, no matter what we brought them, there was always space for them! I wanted to make sure the actors felt invited to explore, take risks, and try out ideas.

Anna: On the front of the poetry packet there's a century-old image of a group of women holding hands and dancing in a circle outside, and under the photo I wrote a line of Julia's from the play, “We, as people are guardians to each other. When we give love.” You cannot successfully explore the narratives of women if you are not listening to each other, allowing everyone to be vulnerable, and committing to a transformative journey together. I think we didn't necessarily know how we were going to do that going in, because there’s not just a successful formula.

We need theatre that doesn't provide the answers, but gives us the power to connect with each other, to re-discover ourselves, and tells us that a mystery does not have to be isolating.

Juliana: Hmm. I just zoomed out to the state of theatre right now. For me, setting up a room means sharing oneself as a human. I am not shy about being a Fornés Fan Girl: about how much I love her, how much I resonate with her plays, and how much her gorgeous imagination moves me. That rehearsal room was an experiment in making tenderness, respect, listening, and owning one's own feelings prominent ingredients in the process. I think theatre needs this more than ever. How are the mysteries of the play not something to be fought and feared, but portals into our relationship with the text that form the bedrock of our collaborations? And allow our intuitive responses to be valid starting points for analysis—everyone’s, not just a director’s.

Anna: And if I've taken away anything from this, it is: we need theatre that doesn't provide the answers, but gives us the power to connect with each other, to re-discover ourselves, and tells us that a mystery does not have to be isolating.

Juliana: Yes. And watching you dramaturg your first show going from, “How do I do this?” to “here is a way that dramaturgy could look” has been so moving and freeing for me. I felt that commitment of yours very early on. You were open and curious to both the questions of the play, but also trying to understand for yourself what my vision of the play was. We were working as collaborators and not strictly as a mentor/mentee.

Anna: I think we just should always work together. I just want to be the Bernie Taupin to your Elton John. What the theatre world needs now is us as a duo, writing power ballads. But anyway, I think you made a great point about positioning yourself as equally a mentor and collaborator—I was able to get as much guidance as I did, take risks, and have my own agency, and you were such an active and responsive listener because you always paid attention to my artistry and my work.

Juliana: And, in turn, we together paid deep attention to this process as a whole.

Anna: You were such a comfort for me to really learn how to feel rooted in my knowledge and understanding of the play. We ended our process in as much ambiguity as we started, but we have grown as people. And though we are still in the unknown, we have a new understanding of the world, and that's possible. And that is an attainable goal.

Juliana: And that's theatre right? That's theatre.

Anna: Period.

Juliana: Or perhaps, that is Irene's theatre.