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NEW YORK TIMES TOP GIRLS REVIEW
Ladies Who Lunch? No, Here’s to the Power Players
by Ben Brantley
It seems safe to say that no New York restaurant, not even Michael’s or the Four Seasons, has seen a power meal to match the one that so exhilaratingly begins Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls,” which opened last night in a well-acted revival at the Biltmore Theater.
Nor can Barbara Walters, Tina Brown or any of their high-rolling sisterhood claim to have assembled a gathering of women like those who share rich foods and richer confidences in this imperfect but important play from 1982. That’s because most Rolodexes don’t have contact numbers for a dauntless world traveler from the Victorian era, a hell-storming peasant warrior out of a Flemish Renaissance painting, a 13th-century Japanese courtesan turned Buddhist nun, a too-dutiful wife from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” or a martyred female pope from the Middle Ages.
But it also seems safe to say that any contemporary woman of power will find she has much in common with these wine-gulping, centuries-spanning figures, embodied with zeal and finesse by a starry cast that features Elizabeth Marvel, Marisa Tomei and Martha Plimpton. That includes a sad and sobering awareness of the lower depths that lurk at the top for those who have worked, fought and married their way up. As Marlene (Ms. Marvel), the party’s 20th-century hostess, asks, “Why are we all so miserable?”
Watching that consciousness surface in Ms. Churchill’s fantasy dinner in a London restaurant, where Marlene is celebrating her promotion to managing director of an employment agency, makes the first act of “Top Girls” not only an inspired gimmick but also one of the most resonant theatrical set pieces of the past 50 years. And it has been done full justice here by a cast rounded out by Mary Catherine Garrison, Mary Beth Hurt, Jennifer Ikeda and Ana Reeder, directed with intelligence and sensitivity by James Macdonald.
That nothing else in “Top Girls” equals its virtuosic opening scene is no fault of this revival, a Manhattan Theater Club production. Even 25 years ago, when the play opened at the Public Theater in New York, it was evident that Ms. Churchill had saved her best for first.
This brilliant, adventurous dramatist, though, was not yet practicing the poetic economy evident in later works like “Far Away” and “A Number.” In “Top Girls” she makes the implicit explicit. The themes explored with such stylistic vigor in the first act are parsed and laid bare in the more naturalistic second and third.
In these, set in the dawn of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Marlene is seen in both the unforgiving world of affluence in which she now lives and the equally unforgiving one of poverty she escaped from. (In its published form “Top Girls” is two acts; here it has been redivided into three.)
These sections are often intellectually engaging. It’s fun catching the echoes of ideas about feminine sacrifice, restlessness and moral compromise established in the fantasy sequence. But eventually these later scenes start to feel like predigested food for thought. And there are moments of confrontation that remind you of old-fashioned weepies, albeit spiked with a socialist conscience. (Of course a lot of British dramatists, including David Hare, were writing that way in the Thatcher age.)
It’s the commitment and enthusiasm of Mr. Macdonald’s cast that continue to hold your attention. How often, after all, do you get to watch this many actresses at this level of talent sharing a single stage, a meaty subject and the chance to flex underused theatrical muscles?
Aside from Ms. Marvel, who provides a magnetic center as the ambition-driven Marlene, everyone has more than one part. And it’s a delight to see how each settles so comfortably into different complex roles without signaling how clever she is.
The casting alone in the first act is cause for joy. Ms. Plimpton, with her thundering alto and concrete presence, was made for the adamantine (and possibly apocryphal) Pope Joan, who confidently ruled the Vatican in the ninth century until she gave birth to a child. (The witty, mixed-period costumes are by Laura Bauer.)
Ms. Tomei, an actress of effortless-seeming nuance, brings fine layers of guilt and determination to the role of the British world traveler Isabella Bird. Ms. Garrison’s girlishness with a sting feeds perfectly into Chaucer’s Patient Griselda, the obedient victim of some of the sickest spousal abuse in literary history.
I’m equally hard-pressed to think of better choices for Dull Gret, the laconic peasant warrior, and Lady Nijo, a Japanese emperor’s concubine, than Ms. Reeder and Ms. Ikeda, lively counterpoints in crudeness and delicacy. And it’s truly thrilling to observe all these actresses navigate the tricky waters of Ms. Churchill’s overlapping dialogue.
They’re just as good, if less entertainingly flashy, in the succeeding scenes in which they portray, among other things, the proud-to-be-tough employment agents and their job-seeking interviewees. Ms. Hurt, who appears memorably as the stern waitress in the first act, has a pitch-perfect scene in the second as a middle-aged office manager, newly awakened to anger she has suppressed for years.
The third act, in which Marlene returns to the working-class neighborhood of her youth, is the most conventional. In it Marlene and her sister, Joyce (Ms. Tomei), drink, confront, confess and argue over the care and feeding of Angie, Joyce’s simple-minded teenage daughter (a totally credible Ms. Plimpton). This all too often has the air of a politicized episode of “Coronation Street,” the long-running British soap opera.
Then again, without that concluding act, we would miss the silent vision of Ms. Tomei’s Joyce, alone onstage, as her eyes register the long stretch of her inevitable hardscrabble future. Or the opportunity to watch Ms. Marvel’s Marlene get drunk again and follow a snaking path through sentimentality, guilt, bluster, anger and animal fear.
It’s fear that Ms. Churchill leaves us with. When you look back, you appreciate the eerie appropriateness of Tom Pye’s diaphanous sets, which float amid the black maw of a bare stage. That blackness, seen or unseen, is always in Ms. Churchill’s plays, whether she’s writing about Communist Romania (in “Mad Forest”), environmental destruction (“The Skriker”) or Anglo-American relations (in “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?,” staged by Mr. Macdonald this season).
It’s this abiding darkness that gives “Top Girls” an affecting charge that transcends its schematic side. As always Ms. Churchill is merciless in pointing out that everything in this life is scary, including the landscape of roads taken and not taken that every woman faces, no matter what century she’s from.
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