"...marvelous casting and acting"

July 21, 2005 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Company of Top Girls
Photo: Richard Feldman

Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, now playing at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in a rapid paced and engaging performance, is as timely in subject matter as it was back in 1982 when it opened in London to great acclaim. The glass ceiling of this feminist play is not much easier to crack than it was in the Margaret Thatcher days in which the play delighted or enraged Londoners.

The current Berkshire revival is brilliantly cast and all seven women, who during the course of the play appear in the seventeen female roles in the script, are captivating actresses and deserve applause. The play is a demanding one and all rise to its demands.

Churchill is a confrontational playwright and highly acclaimed; her subject matter and her scattershot organization will delight some and confuse, and even offend, others. There are poignant moments and hysterically funny ones that bounce back and forth.

The first act is brilliant. Marlene (Jessica Hecht) is hosting a dinner party to celebrate her promotion in her job in an employment agency. Her guests are five women who in other times and places challenged the male world. These women seem to have made it but 'seem' is the key word.

The women are Lady Nijo (Reiko Aylesworth) a medieval Japanese concubine who later became a wandering Buddist nun; Pope Joan (Ellen McLaughlin) who, disguising herself as a man, actually became Pope in the ninth century only to be unfrocked when she embarrassingly gave birth during a royal procession; Isabella Bird (Becky Ann Baker) a Victorian traveler who trekked the world with camera and notebook; and two women, not drawn from history but from the world of art - Dull Gret and Patient Griselda.

These two, imaginatively and ingeniously drawn into the mix, bring in other examples of the female/male conflict. Dull Gert (Laura Heisler) is the leader of the band in Brueghel's painting of the harrowing of Hell. The Patient Griselda (Elizabeth Reaser) is the "obedient wife" whose story is told by one of the Canterbury Pilgrims.

The dinner party scene is brilliantly directed; each woman's story gets told (with constant interruptions, over-lapping dialog while someone orders soup) and with the fates of the women evoking courage, humor and pathos. The non-stop chatter though at times so over-lapping it is hard to follow, has been brilliantly staged by director, Jo Bonney, who manages to move the guests about and gives subtle dominance to the actress then deserving it.

The end of act one moves briefly to the real mundane world of the employment office where Marlene is indeed "top girl." Hers is the only role in the play in which one actress is not double or triple cast. In this "real world," the historical women all move into women and child roles in which the inequalities of the male/femle world can continue to be fought out.

In these roles, the actresses are equally brilliant: Dull Gret becomes Angie an unwanted, slightly retarded fifteen-year old girl; Isabella Bird has taken on the role of Joyce the child’s “mother” to cover Marlene’s unwanted pregnancy; the Waitress from the dinner scene (Brienin Bryant) can show her considerable skills as Kit, younger but brighter friend of Angie and a few minutes later appear as Shona a would-be lying client in the advertising agency. And all members of the cast make similar and competent role changes.

Act two scenes shift back and forth between the employment agency and the humble home outside London from which Marlene has escaped to try to climb the executive ladder. They are not chronological, the last scene taking place earlier than any other in the play and spelling out defeat with a thud.

Some audiences will love this play for its brilliant dialog, its smashing costumes provided by Ilona Somogi, its absolutely marvelous casting and acting. Some will find its rapid fire British dialog slipping past them too quickly or object to its super feminist politics.

This reviewer had mixed reactions finding, in content, that the play tended to cover ground we already knew and that there are thousands of Marlenes in our everyday life. The imaginative bringing in of the historical and literary figures was more intriguing both in my pre-reading of the play and in my viewing of the production.

Regretfully, I liked the production better than I liked the play.

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