Performances 12, 13, 14 November
8:00pm
This is a virtual event. Please check your inbox on the day of the performance for details and the link to view the performance. If you have any questions please email performance@mit.edu.
Several old friends and friends of friends gather at Fefu’s New England country home in the late 1930’s to prepare a gala performance. For a theater meant to reflect life itself their conversations, their actions, their dances accelerate into an evening of dialogue at the heart of their experience of gender, intimacy, sex, trauma, class and joy. Rifleshots, water balloons, and hallucinations ensue in this meteoric work of environmental theater. Fefu and Her Friends is an at times unsettling laugh-until-you-cry-comedy and an all-the-time thought provoking tour de force.
Fefu and Her Friends is presented as a 90 minute live cinema-streaming-performance for eight female, nonbinary and/or gender nonconforming performers via remote cameras and real-time effects processing live-streamed for a remote audience—promising that performances from afar have never felt more intimate, never more close. Their conversations draw us to the kitchen, into the bath, through the bedroom and into the garden, we snuggle up to Julia, walk hand in hand with Paula to the patio, have words in the living room, dance in the study and race up the stairs of Fefu’s home in New England—the luxurious Gropius Haus. In the final act, after the rifle shots and the arguments we’ll find ourselves once again in no real place, but witness to one another. Having made a difference, having heard, and having seen one another. Speaking freely and compassionately at last. Eschewing distance in the name of expression, and anyway, as Cecilia says, “We cannot survive in a vacuum. We must be part of a community...”
CAST
With Rian Flynn as Fefu, Montserrat Garza as Cecilia, Adelynn Paik as Paula, Ishita Bhimavarapu as Sue, Molly Peterson as Cindy, Jacqueline Montante as Jackie, Haruka Ueda as Julia, Elaheh Ahmadi as Christina, and Opalina Vetrichelvan as Emma.
CREATIVE
With Virtual Environment Design by Afsoon Pajoufar, Video Design by Josh Higgason, Costume Design by Shanise DeSilva, Lighting by Kevin Fulton, Sound Design by Christian Frederickson, Technical Direction by Stephanie Rodemann, Production Coordination by Miguel Flores, Choreography by Dan Safer, Graphic Design by Dan Pecci, this stage is managed by Margaret Kosten and Directed by Jay Scheib.
