Industrial Offers Fierce, Furious 'Fefu'

Industrial Theatre has mounted another production in the quirky spirit which has marked its Cambridge seasons since the company’s 1995 founding.

Fefu and Her Friends, by Maria Irene Fornes, abounds with odd character embellishments and engaging, converging plot lines. Everything comes together in an intriguing and unsettling commentary on the relationships women share with men and with each other.

The light and frolicsome title is misleading. Though the setting is a picturesque, upscale New England country house, Fefu’s get together with seven women to discuss a presentation supporting primary school education for the disadvantaged turns into a complex forum in which the women speculate about the meaning of womanhood.

Greatly aiding the production is an inviting set that furthers, by contrast, the intensity of the harrowing emotions displayed on stage. Leverett Old Library has been masterfully sectioned off into five separate sets.

The audience starts off as one large group sitting in a circle around Fefu’s living room, on level ground with the actors. After the characters are introduced, the audience divides into four groups and visits the four smaller sets individually, picking up different storylines for different characters along the way. The play concludes with all back in the living room.

Such inventive staging results in each audience member feeling a distinct connection to each of the characters; those watching grow to further understand the character’s complexities.

The unique physical staging allows the play’s themes to emerge in particularly compelling fashion.

Chief among those themes is the tendency of women to trap themselves in positions of inferiority, essentially killing off their independence.

Julia, played convincingly by Irene Daly, embodies the woman ruled by self-doubt. She is a cripple with vivid delusions of an unseen oppressor who, in one scene, forces her to recite a prayer that calls women unclean creatures denied entrance into heaven.

Fefu is the quirky woman that brings all the women under her roof. Though quirky is a term oft used these days, it seems particularly appropriate to describe a woman who plays a version of Russian roulette with her unseen husband, Phillip: She regularly fires a shotgun at him without knowing whether or not the bullets are real.

The dangerous games that Fefu and many of the characters play shock not only the conservative character Christina, but also the audience.

Though Fefu’s troubled marriage and off-kilter proclamations that women are loathsome creatures hint that she is bound for the sort of morbid state that envelops Julia, she maintains a cheerfully unsettling demeanor most of the time.

The rest of the cast, most playing fairly irregular sorts, address women’s concerns including suppression of sexuality, love affair cycles and conservatism.

The play deals with serious issues in a way that is at times comical. It mirrors how so many women deal with their problems and insecurities by disregarding them as nothing serious. Strong acting performances make these themes particularly accessible.

The production achieves a sense of playfulness with the audience, which it craftily contrasts with the reality of the suffering and conflict faced by the characters. The setup and deliverance are effective in raising questions in audience members’ heads. Its dark ending leaves a haunting quality in viewers that sticks as they contemplate the significance of events. Only after tossing the characters and actions back and forth does the viewer grasp a meaning for it all, but the result is well worth the effort.

theater

Fefu and Her Friends

Industrial Theatre Company

Written by Maria Irene Fornes

Directed by Christopher Scully

At the Leverett Old Library Theatre

Feb. 1-16