Fefu, Her Friends, and Binary Terror

At past institutions of higher education, I’ve always enjoyed working collaboratively across campus, creating projects that engage performance for the purpose of enhancing the messaging those other departments are focusing on and conversations those collaborators are having. This work is integral to who I am.

In my early years as a middle school theatre teacher, I directed D.W. Gregory’s The Radium Girls as a means of talking to my students about how individual values are often misdirected by corporations who seek to profit—this was in Houston, shortly after the BP oil spill. When history teachers at that same school were told to stop teaching students about the trail of tears during the unit on Andrew Jackson, my theatre students and I devised movement pieces around poetry written during that historic moment.

I have continued engaging in this type of work, both as a student and as a faculty member. As a student at CU Boulder, I organized the campus’s first Playback Theatre troupe, which facilitated many difficult dialogues across campus and in the broader Colorado community. I performed in the CWORX ensemble, which utilized high fidelity emotional improvisation to train first responders to engage in crisis de-escalation with empathy and communication. I created the “It Happens Here” project as a part-time instructor on the Auraria campus, working with the Phoenix Center and theatre students to develop performance projects that highlighted the many forms of interpersonal violence that exist on campus and their prevalence. This is the work that I believe makes “theatre” worthwhile as a life journey.

California State University Fullerton is the first educational institution at which I’ve been dissuaded from this type of work.

I’ve been told that socially-engaged theatre “devalues our department” and that “theatre is never political,” both of which are statements I disagree with although I can respect others’ opinions. Moreover, when I began collaborating with another department to generate a performance festival unrelated to the theatre department, I was commanded by my chair to cease.

I can’t, though. These are the projects that reinvigorate me. Without them, I will burn out—rapidly—on the commercial theatre that the department prioritizes.

Enter the Binary Terror Project, which later came to be retitled “Binary Trappings: an Immersive Experience.” (I’m partial to the original title)

Hannah in character, performing in the kitchen alongside seated audience members.

I started this project last year, in conversation with the LGBTQ Student Resource Center, the Women and Gender Studies department, and CSUF’s alumni house. We decided to produce an immersive, site-specific adaptation of Fefu and Her Friends in the alumni house, during which the audience would be charged with the task of defining and creating “the perfect woman.” Each performance would culminate in the audience presenting their work and an invitation to a roundtable-discussion-adaptation of a talkback.

We sold out nearly two weeks in advance, but the entire process was a part of the project, not merely the final performances and conversations.

I began auditions by explaining the entirety of the project—this would involve work beyond being in the show. I explained immersive work, and facilitated an immersive performance workshop. Then, I informed all actors that if they were interested in the project, they were called back.

Less than half of the actors returned, which was perfect. I wanted people who cared about the content and were intrigued by the format to be involved. I cast from among these—to the chagrin of my superiors, who tried to convince me to rescind role offers and instead give them to BFA students who did not attend call-backs. I declined to acquiesce.

The process was deeply engaged in analyzing the societal factors that form our understanding of gender and inform our performances of it. Some argued that this was not appropriate for undergraduate theatre majors, but my students eagerly absorbed the information I brought to them, and selected their own theoretical and dramaturgical texts to introduce into the conversation, deepening our understanding of not only María Irene Fornés’s beautifully surreal text, but of the ways it communicates to both history and to our lives. The students worked with our partner departments, leading mini-guest-lectures in coursework and installing interactive artworks around campus that questioned the gender binary. And all of this informed our rehearsal process, which I’ll let a student describe (taken from anonymous SOQ responses):

Amanda Rose created an impeccable learning and production environment. I have never been so excited to come to rehearsal! Every day was challenging but hilarious and full of care. I felt heard as a collaborator and it was a nice change of pace. I felt that the environment Amanda Rose created was one full of trust, consent, and respect. I felt that I could say no and have my boundaries respected. I felt that I could say I didn’t understand and be supported instead of insulted. I felt that they treated us as a cast as equals rather than there being a power imbalance between the director and actor but at the same time Amanda Rose always felt like a leader and I never stopped learning and being inspired.

Through a mixture of devising processes, Viewpoints and Rasa Boxes workshops, and the curatorial directing approach, we developed a performance. Every night, as is often the case with immersive works that engage audience participation, was different, revealing new discoveries at each performance. And the audiences were brilliantly and boldly engaged. Each talkback/roundtable was insightful; several nights, we had to force an end so that we could lock the building in accordance with university police, despite the conversation remaining enthusiastically engaged.

audience members, discussing what an “ideal woman” is

—if there is such a thing

I think my favorite moment was on alumni night; an elderly woman picked a rose from the site’s garden, pinning it to the board. “This way,” she proclaimed to all present, “she will slowly wither and dry out like they say women do.” She turned after pinning the bud where a doll’s head might appear, addressing the college students in the cast. “But just know that none of what they say is true. Whether you’re a woman or a femme or—what did you call it?—nonbinary, you get to define the seasons in which you bloom.”

The piece described above, on her first night amongst the rest of our “ideal woman” board

An audience member wrote down memorable quotes from the performance

…and several days later, added to and begun to wither

It was incredible to learn and work and speak alongside so many over the course of the past few months. I only hope that my department will take note of the impact that engaged performance can have. And if they don’t, engaging in nightly conversations about gender and queer theory across generations was truly invigorating; this process prompted incredibly philosophical conversations daily for two weeks. I feel like that is entirely worth it.

People want to think. We want to engage. And if we can do so while partaking in art, all the better.

And although the project and conversation made some feel uncomfortable, if it made them think and reflect upon themselves and the world in which they and this art exist, then we succeeded in what we set out to do; furthermore, I believe we upheld Fornés’s intentions with the Fefu and Her Friends text.

I am so incredibly proud of the cast, crew, and stage management team, all of whom learned new approaches to creating theatre that both invites our audience to participate artistically and intellectually. I wish I had more photos to represent the entirety of this project, but that was impossible to do. Below are a few that feature the audience-crafted binary terror boards and shots from the show.

Our cast BTS BeReal

Our run crew, designers, and stage management team