Farmhands to Present Site Specific Production of FEFU AND HER FRIENDS by Maria Irene Fornes
The production will run for one weekend only, March 20th - 23rd, 2025.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Feb. 17, 2025
Farmhands will present a site specific production of Fefu and Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornes. Directed by Sophie Dushko and staged intimately in a West Village townhouse, the production will run for one weekend only, March 20th - 23rd, 2025, hosted by fashion designer Nanette Lepore.
The cast will include Gabrielle Carrubba, Nicole Chaffin, Gagarin, Lauren Guglielmello, Michelle Moriarty, Erin Noll, Violet Savage, and Kim Savarino. TaTyana Smith will stage manage with lighting design by Henry Mont, production design by Stella Gatti, and costume consultation by Nanette Lepore. Jaclyn Bethany will serve as a co-producer.
Set in 1935, Fefu and Her Friends centers on a meeting between a group of women and explores their relationships with each other, their bodies, gender, class, desire, men, politics, revulsion, and violence. This contemporary production aims to encounter the play and its characters with fresh eyes influenced by our current political landscape and personal experiences. With a gender expansive cast featuring cis and non-binary performers, the company seeks to push the boundaries of the play's conversation around gender, privilege, embodiment, and power and confront the internal oppositions and resistances within these characters.
Playwright Maria Irene Fornes was a trailblazer for female and queer theatre artists and an icon of the off-off-Broadway movement as a writer, teacher, and the director of the original production of most of her plays including Fefu and Her Friends. Described by the New York Times as a play, "more often read and studied than performed", Fefu and Her Friends was first performed in a New York City loft in 1977. The space itself inspired the play's unique promenade performance style - in the second act, the audience is split into four groups and rotates through a sequence of intimate monologues and duologues in various locations. Equal parts interrogation and celebration, this new production reaches back to the play's residential roots while bringing its uncanny and uncomfortable relevance into the present moment.
Sophie Dushko is a director, performer, and playwright with an affinity for heightened text, ritual, eroticism, physical storytelling, and brazen theatricality. Her recent directing credits include the developmental workshop of Niccolo Walsh's Where the Boys Are and the premieres of her plays how would you like me to atone? and vérité. Her play galatea 2.0 premiered in 2023 at Brooklyn Art Haus presented by Invulnerable Nothings and directed by C.C. Kellogg. As an actor, Sophie has worked with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, and Invulnerable Nothings (where she is an associate artist). See sophiedushko.com for more info on past and current projects.
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