Theatre review: Wickets

“Woman is not a human being. She is 1) a mystery, 2) another species, 3) as yet undefined, 4) unpredictable.”
--Julia, Wickets

Doing an old play with a new concept can be tricky. If done correctly, it offers a new and invigorating perspective; if not, it’s pretentious at best and confusing at worst. You can do Richard III in Nazi Germany, for example, but you cannot set it in a disco. The script won’t support it. When I first heard about Wickets, I admit I was skeptical. Marie Irene Fornes’ notoriously postmodern 1977 play, Fefu and Her Friends, which explores the dark underbelly of feminism, set on an airplane? I girded myself for pretension.

Happily, Wickets is one of the best reinterpretations I’ve ever seen, and the only version of Fefu and Her Friends I’ve seen that actually made sense. Despite being written in 1977, the message of Fefu and Her Friends remains ever the same: women don’t what to do with feminism. Or rather, they don’t know what to do with themselves. It’s a strange, unsettling play, not least because the strong women characters are at a loss with each other and with themselves. Without a man to center around, they disintegrate into cattiness and then madness.

But Fefu is probably deranged to begin with. She “pretends” to shoot her husband with gun that may or may not be loaded. She likes men better than women and finds women “loathsome.” In Fornes’ plays, she and her friends are a group of 1935 society women, bored and affected in the manner of society women who have too much free time. In the last act, the women turn giggly, then bitchy, and then everything takes a really tragic turn for the worse.

It’s not a realistic play, but it’s not strictly allegorical either. It centers around the dark imagery and emotional backwash at the heart of the play. Full of self-loathing and self-doubt, the women only gradually realize the dual reality of their lives; the glossy surface and the dark underbelly. It’s thought-provoking but challenging; this is not a play for those who enjoy escapism in their theatre.

In Wickets, these same women are airline stewardesses in the heyday of luxury air travel, 1971. Fefu, written in 1977, looks back forty years at 1935, in an attempt to see how far women have come, and how far they have yet to go. This production looks back almost forty years, to 1971, when feminism was beginning to shift but had not yet permeated everyday life. The characters are stewardesses on a trans-Atlantic flight to Paris; the original script of Fefu is largely intact, with additions from Bernard Glemser’s 1969 pulp novel, The Fly Girls, a 1969 3-D porn firm called The Stewardesses, Valerie Solanas’ “Scum Manifesto,” and an Emily Dickinson poem. There are original songs, dance numbers to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia,” with a wholly original in-flight movie called “Perfect Surf.” There are, of course, the usual flight announcements. The title takes its name from the hoops used in croquet; the last scene involves an onboard game.

The small space at 3LD has been ingeniously transformed into an airplane by Jenny Rogers, with narrow aisles, drink carts, tiny windows, and a curtain separating first class from steerage. The characters serve us warm nuts, Tang, water, pillows and wet towels, then collect trash, while speaking their lines. The second act of Fefu calls for the action to take place in four separate rooms, while the audience moves from room to room; here, the stewardesses section the plane off into four parts for the “turn-down service,” then move through the plane, so that the four scenes come to us. The crisis at the end becomes severe turbulence, accompanied by the arrival of a mysterious angel.

As stewardesses, the characters embody the inherent contradictions in feminism far better than bored society women ever could. These women work for a living, but in a job which requires them to be beautiful, flirty, and a little dim. The gifted actors allow bits of individual personality to surface, even while playing stereotypes; this is a fantastic example of ensemble acting, led by equally gifted directors Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers. It’s odd how the script actually supports the concept—while it never would have occurred to me to put the two together, it works, and it’s heartwarming to see new life breathed into a classic in this way. Wickets brings out the central message—and humor—in Fefu in a way that traditional productions often don’t.

This may be the only time I’ve ever actually enjoyed being on an airplane.


Adapted from Fefu and Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornes, by Jenny Rogers
Created and directed by Jenny Rogers and Clove Galilee
With Katie Apicella, Elizabeth Wakehouse, Christianna Nelson, Jessica Jolly, Kristen Rozanski, Lee Eddy, Jona Tuck, Maria Parra, Eric Walton and Lucas Steele
Set Design and Videography: Jenny Rogers
Lighting Design: Burke Brown
Sound Design: Dean Parker
Costume Design: Candace Knox
Running Time: One hour and forty minutes with no intermission
Trick Saddle at 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich Street; 212-352-3101
Tickets $18
Thursday through Sunday at 8 pm
January 3-25, 2009