STAGE REVIEW : A Melding of Form, Content in Fornes’ ‘Fefu’

Maria Irene Fornes’ elusive “Fefu and Her Friends” is many things, but soap opera is not one of them. Yet even the most eager ear for Rhonda Gelfand’s staging at the Los Angeles Theatre Collective can’t ignore a certain hothouse quality that has you looking around for the TV cameras.

Actually, our eyes provide the camera angles--more so than in most plays. That is because some of the action of Fornes’ tongue-in-cheek drama takes place in four rooms of Fefu’s house, which we wander around, following the hostess and her female guests (Jon Cohen did the “environmental/art design” and Steve Morgan Haskell the lights, which include a bedroom illuminated by lights placed under the bed).

In one room, Fefu and Emma (Sarah Dacey and Rachel Boring) talk about female fear of body parts while exercising. In the living room, Cindy and Christina (Carrie Madsen and Wendy Wood) talk about getting swept off their feet. In the kitchen, Sue tells Paula (Donna Babbin and Krista Keim) that she’s figured out that relationships last seven years and three months--then Sue’s former lover, Cecilia (Elizabeth Mehditach), walks in. In the bedroom, a paralyzed Julia (Maria Hayden) comes out with it: Women are evil, men are human.

This last is the ingrained assumption that Fornes’ women try to unburden themselves of. But the intimately viewed scenes, plus the group interplay in the living room, suggest that it’s a yoke not easily removed. “Maybe,” Sue says about breaking up, “it never really ends.”

The world of Fornes’ people never seems quite real, if you insist on a linear sense of reality. Even the reason why they’re over at Fefu’s, to prepare a pitch for a progressive-sounding educational project, feels inserted.

The late, masterly fiction writer, Donald Barthelme, once noted that collage is the guiding principle of modern art--a principle that undergirds everything Fornes does. Think of a collage work, done on a globular surface, which can be seen only by rolling the globe around, and you get a sense of what it is to watch “Fefu and Her Friends.”

It may be part of the reason why Fornes’ work is infrequently staged here (except at the current Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival, of which she is a fixture). This kind of largely successful experiment in melding form and content can both dazzle and puzzle actors and directors accustomed to more conventional dramaturgy.

Which brings us back to the soap opera problem. While Gelfand’s cast has a firm grasp on such subtleties as the idea that we may be seeing, in the central room-to-room scenes, various stages in a woman’s life, the line deliveries too often stress a melodramatic accent outside of Fornes’ poetic dialect.

The approach requires a slightly clinical stance, in the way Pirandello does, otherwise you end up with actors going one way, the playwright going the other. Dacey and Hayden understand this, but their colleagues are still learning.

At 712 Grandview Ave., on Fridays and Saturdays, 8:30 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m., through Aug. 20. Tickets: $10; (213) 386-4901.