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“I am in constant pain.  I don’t want to give into it.  If I do, I’m afraid I will never recover…It’s not physical, and it’s not sorrow.  It’s very strange Emma, I can’t describe it, and it’s very frightening.”

So begins one of the central articulations by Fefu of her condition, and the central meaning of the play [amazon_link id=”155554052X” target=”_blank” ]Fefu and Her Friends[/amazon_link] by [amazon_link id=”0933826834″ target=”_blank” ]Maria Irene Fornes[/amazon_link].  In three prominent scenes, Fornes reveals the unspoken angst that is destroying the women at this 1935 New England gathering.

From Cleveland Public Theatre's production.

In a play that I’ve heard described as no play at all it is often difficult to put your finger on the precise malady that is afflicting all the women, as Fefu says, “I can’t describe it.”  Fortunately for us, there are two characters who can describe it.  These two characters make up the other two prominent scenes that reveal the angst.  The first of these remaining two scenes complements the “On the Lawn” scene from which I’ve quoted above, this is the “In the Bedroom” where Julia, a woman suffering from psychosomatic paralysis, tells us what is afflicting her:

“They clubbed me. They broke my head. They broke my will. They broke my hands. They tore my eyes out.  They took my voice away.”

And on she goes.  Julia discusses the role of the “judges” and the “guardians” in her hallucinatory rant.  The judges and guardians make up the “they” that is a constant refrain throughout this scene, per the above.  What is most important perhaps is the revelation by Julia that “They are after her too.”  The her being Fefu.

The third of the prominent scenes that strikes at the central meaning of this play–as if any one thing could–is the speech by Emma in Part Three. Emma is a woman with a strong and powerful presence in the play that is strengthened by the fact that so many of the women are unsure of themselves; whereas Emma is certainly not.  At a rehearsal for some future presentation (the purpose of which we are not entirely sure) Emma quotes from the prologue of Emma Sheridan Fry’s 1917 book [amazon_link id=”1459070917″ target=”_blank” ]Educational Dramatics[/amazon_link].  For the prologue to a book about the importance of acting and dramatizing education, this has to rank among the most metaphysical of prologues ever.  The gist of the piece is that we have lost touch with the outside world–the world outside our heads and outside our own meager ego-oriented lives–and the will and spirit within us that makes us want to embrace this world.  “The Environment knocks at the gateway of the senses,” Emma begins.  “We do not answer.”  But we need to answer.  Why? Because outside of our heads and our meager perception of the world “life universal surges” and “life universal” holds for us the promise that “all is ours…that whatever anyone has ever known, or may ever know, we will call and claim.”  That in each of us is a light, a strong and powerful light, that shines out all we can achieve, and glory in the brilliance of our own strength and power and the joy of our creation and life.  And yet, we are reluctant.  We hunker down and hide.  We do nothing. Why do we not fulfill our potential?  Emma has an answer for that, too.

“Society restricts us, school straight jackets us, civilization submerges us, privation wrings us, luxury feather beds us.  The Divine Urge is checked.  The Winged Horse balks on the road, and we, discouraged, defeated, dismount and burrow into ourselves.  The gates are closed and Divine Urge is imprisoned at Center.  Thus we are taken by indifference that is death.”

In this quote can be found the key to the oft-quoted phrase from Christ, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19:24) The meaning here is not a repudiation of wealth just because…  It has to do with the things that accompany wealth: “luxury feather beds us.”  The essence is that it is extraordinarily difficult to be spiritual when the body is so well comforted.  In the world of worship, the soul must yearn and it is impossible for the soul to yearn when the body is pleasured, i.e. distracted.  Emma expands the list of things that can kill the Divine Urge, but each has a role.  It certainly is fun to quote both Christ and Pink Floyd in the same paragraph, as I am reminded too "Another Brick in the Wall" from [amazon_link id=”B004ZNAXX2″ target=”_blank” ] The Wall[/amazon_link]:

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thoughts controlled
No dark sarcasm in the class room
Teachers leave them kids alone
(yells) hey teachers leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

Fornes is suggesting the same thing.  Or rather, Pink Floyd is suggesting the same thing as Fornes (as she came first!), and in fact The Wall is a good musical/filmic counterpart to what this play is describing: the creation of a wall around the women, a wall that undermines them, defeats them, breaks them down, tells them they are inferior.

For Julia, the end has already been achieved.  She is broken.  Her strength is sapped as is her will to live.  The process is just beginning for Fefu.  Her nameless pain is the start.  Julia speaks of what the judges and guardians do, but this perhaps is too abstract, too strange a thing to get one’s head around, so, very like the teachers in the Pink Floyd song, Fornes provides us with explicit examples:

SUE: At the end of the first semester they called her in because she had been out with 28 men and they thought that was awful.  And the worst thing was that after that, she thought there was something wrong with her.

CINDY: (Jokingly) She was a nymphomaniac, that’s all.

SUE: She was not.  She was just very beautiful so all the boys wanted to go out with her. And if a boy asked her to go have a cup of coffee she’d sign out and write in the name of the boy.  None of us did of course.  All she did was go for coffee or go to a movie.  She was really very innocent.

EMMA: And Gloria Schuman? She wrote a psychology paper the faculty decided she didn’t write and they called her in to try to make her admit she hadn’t written it. She insisted she wrote it and they sent her to a psychiatrist also.

JULIA: Everybody ended going to the psychiatrist.

EMMA: After a few visits the psychiatrist said: Don’t you think you know me well enough now that you can tell me the truth about the paper? He almost drove her crazy.  They just couldn’t believe she was so smart.

So, again, here we see the judges and the guardians in action.  Standing above the young women, passing judgment, guarding their conscience and their intellect, regulating them; ensuring that the Divine Urge is never realized.

The gist of [amazon_link id=”155554052X” target=”_blank” ]Fefu and Her Friends[/amazon_link] is contained in the three prominent scenes above (prominent because they contain the three strongest characters of the play who pronounce the largest ideas of the play).  Emma warns the women that they must “seek the laws governing real life forces, that coming into their own, they may create, develop, and reconstruct.”  Create, develop, and reconstruct what?  Society?  The Culture?  The way they relate to each other, and to men?  All of these are legitimate answers and represent what must be reconstructed.  For Julia it is too late, as demonstrated by the final scene in the play.  It may be too late for Fefu as well, who wraps herself in the bravado of masculinity to cover over her fear of redefining herself.

I’ll come back later and consider other things: themes, images, that strange shit with the gun, the animal, and Julia, etc.

In 1992, according to a report from the National Endowment for the Arts¹, an estimated 13.5% of the U.S. adult population attended a live dramatic theater event.  This was up from 11.9% in 1982. 

In 1992, this estimated 13.5% represented between 24 and 26.2 million adult Americans².  Further, the NEA reported that there was a frequency of attendance of 2.4 times per person, meaning that roughly 60.2 million attendances of a live dramatic theater event were recorded in the United States.  As this study was not repeated for 2002, it is somewhat difficult to gauge the trend, but if the trend has been sustained, 15.1% of the U.S. adult population attended a performance in 2002. With an estimated adult population of 216 million in the United States that means that nearly 33 million Americans attended a theatre event in 2002 and if the same 2.4 frequency of attendance applies, 79.4 million attendances would have been recorded. To put this in perspective, in 2007 Major League Baseball gleefully reported 79 million people attended baseball games in the United States³. The data described above indicates, at the very least, that there is great interest in theatre in the United States, and other factors point to the impact that active and successful theatres have on their communities.  For instance, the June 24th Plain Dealer article presents evidence that successful theatres are a boon to revitalizing neighborhoods and increasing economic development⁴.  A fact further confirmed by the same NEA report mentioned at the outset, which concludes that:

Dynamic forces shape [theater] participation patterns in each community, including characteristics of the resident and nonresident markets, the supply of producing and presenting activity, the availability of suitable performance facilities, as well as local traditions and history."  And further, that vital [theater-going] communities will exist where vital theatre producing communities are active and available. 

The report specifically identifies highest theatre participation rates in "Seattle/King County (WA) where a thriving theatre community was observed, including playwrights, actors, and a plethora of small, experimental ensembles known collectively as ‘Seattle’s fringe theaters.’" 

Cleveland, Ohio, certainly has the potential of becoming one of the most successful theatre communities in the United States.  It has a diverse mixture of urban education centers and populations, interested young artists, and established veteran performers, directors, designers, and technicians combined with an historic economic downturn that has left numerous, low-cost spaces accessible and available for use.  This is to say that established, highly-priced, conservative theaters no longer hold the keys to gates of theater entertainment in the Northeast Ohio community. (A fact pointed out in a recent speech on local theater.)

Still, formal external funding sources seem to be the meat and potatoes of most arts organizations: either government sources (such as the newly created Cuyahoga Arts and Culture grants) or foundation sources.  These constitute one set of external stakeholders. While it is easy to see these sources as not only important but a possible bounty, reliance on these sources does not seem to me overly wise or recommended.  Changes in funding priorities or changes in government policies can bring a drought to stream very quickly.  Additionally, one of the dangers in accepting funding from a foundation is that there is some expectation of programming to go along with it, that an organization might, like one sister in Cinderella, cut off her toes to fit the shoe.  This fact is made poignantly clear by Mike Daisy in his article How Theater Failed America, when he writes:

Better to invest in another "educational" youth program, mashing up Shakespeare until it is a thin, lifeless paste that any reasonable person would reject as disgusting, but garners more grant money.⁵

This may be a cynical viewpoint, but if it weren’t true there wouldn’t be a phrase for it in the nonprofit "biz": mission drift.

But if not foundations or government, what then?  Ticket sales are an important part of revenue, but cannot sustain even basic and continuous organizational function, let alone full employment of an acting troupe–unless prices are terribly high.  One plan that came to me serendipitously in the form of an issue of American Theatre was to reach out to universities to cultivate new stakeholders—universities and their faculties, students, and staff.  The plan works like this: a theater sends vouchers to a college; the college distributes them to students; the students go to the theater with the voucher and get in free; the theater then bills the college for the cost of a reduced ticket–and the college takes the money out of the student life budget.  This astonishingly simple strategy accommodates the stakeholder fulfillment of two different organizations at one time, as many universities have, as a part of their strategic plans, some requirement to support the communities in which they live and operate, as well as supporting their more fundamental academic mission.

1. American Participation in Theater, AMS Planning and Research Corporation, Research Division Report #35, National Endowment for the Arts, Santa Ana, Calif. : Seven Locks Press, 1996

2. Stats based on calculation of 13.5% x the U.S. adult population at the time as reported in the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1992.

3. Bloom, Barry M. 2008. MLB salary increase lowest since ’04. December 4. http://www.ticketnews.com/Major-League-Baseball-sees-attendance-drop-for-the-first-time-in-five-years10810000. (Accessed online, December 8, 2008).

4. Litt, Steven. 2007. Energizing Detroit-Shoreway; Theater renovations, new building at the heart of neighborhood revitalization. June 24. The Plain Dealer.

Daisey, Mike. 2008. The Empty Spaces: Or, How Theater Failed America. February 5. The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=503829. (Accessed online December 8, 2008).