4/26/2018

Huntington's "Top Girls": Risk Management

The Cast of "Top Girls"
(photo: T. Charles Erickson)

One is tempted to urge playwright Caryl Churchill to have her people call our people, from the opening surreal scene in her 1982 play, Top Girls, which is set in a London restaurant, with a group gathered by Marlene (Carmen Zilles) to celebrate her promotion to the role of Managing Director of the Top Girls Employment Agency. The group consists of five fascinating females, each representing different historical periods: Isabella Bird (Paula Plum), a nineteenth century writer/traveler; Lady Nijo (Vanessa Kai), a thirteenth century courtesan, later Buddhist nun; Dull Gret (Carmen M. Herlihy), the subject of a Brueghel painting leading women warriors into hell to oppose devils; Pope Joan (Sophia Ramos), a (probably not historical) ninth century female disguised as a man and elected pope; and Patient Griselda (Elia Monte-Brown), the slavishly obedient wife of the Clerk's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. (All of the actors, save Ms. Zilles, also portray other characters later in the play, along with a seventh, Kiara Pichardo). Each has a herstory to share.
 
Back in the proverbial day, in the formidable shadow of Margaret Thatcher, audiences found this conceit promising. So should they today, as the times they aren't a-changing enough yet. At the crux of this work is the seemingly contradictory conflict of choice of having a family or a career. As a seminal treatment of the emergence of feminism, it has lost little if any of its original impact. Through overlapping dialog, merging time periods and fundamental sadness there is an underlying sentiment of incompleteness; as one character puts it, “what kind of life is that?”. For women in the Error of Trump, what can “success” mean for them, with its almost inevitable accompaniments: gender objectification, isolation and loneliness. If the women of that celebratory dinner party all represented varying degrees of historical oppression, what are today's tragic outcomes of risk? And there's that title...Top What? (Well, in the script they also refer to “the boys”, so at least it's an equal opportunity manuscript).


The Cast of "Top Girls"
(photo: T. Charles Erickson)

As Directed by Liesl Tommy, this is a fun ride when Churchill doesn't get in her own way. That use of overlapping (or, worse yet, contemporaneously competing) speeches strikes one as a gimmick that obliterates whatever the playwright is trying to say, and this is exacerbated by the theater's notoriously problematic acoustics. (At intermission, half a dozen patrons in the sixth row center could be seen obtaining hearing-assisted devices). Such dialog has been employed elsewhere (as in Tony Kushner's Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures a few seasons ago), and never serves any purpose other than to portray how real people often speak over one another. This cast is an exemplary one, however, with all of them given meaty scenes, though in that infamous dinner party scene, heavy accents can get in the way of intelligible discourse. If one were to single out one stellar turn it might be that of Herlihy in her roles as Dull Gret and especially as Angie, a young girl who unlocks the secret of the choices Marlene had made. It's a stunner to hear Marlene proclaim about Angie that “she's not going to make it”, as it is when Angie utters a tragic line, “Frightening”. All this is against the Thatcher (and Reagan) political realities which “won't change as long as they're in”. Any resemblance to today's politics is purely intentional.

The creative elements are superb, from the Scenic Design by Rachel Hauck to the Costume Design by Linda Cho, Lighting Design by Mary Louise Geiger, Projection Design by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew and Sound Design and Original Music by Broken Chord. In case you hadn't noticed, all of the performers as well as the creative team are women, which solicits the question: when will the day come that one doesn't notice such a novelty? Talk amongst yourselves. And be careful what you risk for.

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