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Fefu and Her Friends

The play Fefu and Her Friends by Marie Irene Fornes was first performed in 1977, and the work breaks a number of theatrical conventions and can be seen as an experimental work in some respects while at the same time showing considerable control and well-crafted dialogue.

Maria Irene Fornes was born in Havana, Cuba. She emigrated to the United Stats and became an American citizen. She was trained as an artist, but she began writing plays while she was living with Susan Sontag in the early 1960s. She developed into one of the most consistently innovative American playwrights of the age and worked in a range of styles. She has been viewed as a part of the feminist theater movement in the United States largely because she is female, but she does not so view herself. In the 1960s, she wrote primarily one-act plays and music-theater pieces that tended to be farcical and followed in the Absurdist tradition of Ionesco and Mrozek while at the same time expressing an ironic attitude about a number of American myths, such as the quest for economic success and the search for true love. in the 1970s, she moved away from her more light-hearted style and turned to plays that were often minimalist in their language. They often conveyed what Fornes sees as the isolation and anguish experienced by women through the centuries, a theme embodied in Fefu and Her Friends, a play which also exemplifies the new and more minimalist style of the author. Her style is important to the message she wants to convey:

Fornes works in an elliptical style, structuring her plays in short, haunting scenes whose images often burn in the darkness long after each blackout. She actively seeks to inject the spontaneous into her creative process: her first play was composed of scenes each of whose first line came from a different page of a cookbook (Griffiths and Woddis 114-115).

Fornes is often inspired by experiences she has had or objects or ideas she enco...

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Fefu and Her Friends. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:55, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681050.html