In `Top Girls,' Caryl Churchill dissects woman and power

By MICHAEL KUCHWARA

AP Drama Critic
May 7, 2008

NEW YORK -- More than a quarter-century has not diminished the theatricality of "Top Girls," British playwright Caryl Churchill's incisive dissection of how women deal with power and class.

The proof is on display at Broadway's Biltmore Theatre where Manhattan Theatre Club has assembled a top-notch company of actresses for its compelling revival of what is one of Churchill's most intellectually bracing plays.

"Top Girls" may be very much of its time -- it's deliberately set in the early 1980s at the height of the Thatcher-Reagan era -- but its feminist themes resonate just as strongly today, particularly whether to fight or to make accommodations in a male-oriented, thoroughly capitalistic world.

Churchill does make her audience work for that understanding, though, through her extensive use of overlapping, often dense dialogue and the non-chronological flow of plot.

Act 1 demonstrates Churchill at her most fanciful and outlandish. The setting is a tony, modern-day London restaurant where a stylish, high-powered woman is celebrating with an unusual collection of guests: a woman thought to have been the first female pope, a Victorian lady of Scottish descent, a character from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," a concubine for the emperor of Japan and a peasant come to life from a painting by Brueghel.

Each reminisces about how they made do to survive. The hostess, Marlene, is a survivor, too, and she is the one character who threads her way through all three of the play's lively acts, each directed with remarkable precision by James Macdonald.

As played by Elizabeth Marvel, Marlene has worked hard to get where she is and has given up quite a lot. What she has sacrificed eventually comes clear by the end of the evening.

Marlene steels herself for success -- climbing the executive ladder at the Top Girls Employment Agency, where, in Act 2, she has just been promoted over a male counterpart. Her co-workers are a bit catty, and the wife of the man she beat out for the job arrives to ask Marlene to step aside. There's not much chance of that.

Marvel is a forceful, galvanizing actress, easily capturing Marlene's determination. The others demonstrate even more diversity because of the multiple roles they play. Watch Mary Beth Hurt, for example, as an efficient waitress in the restaurant scene get noticed -- by not saying a word. Then, in the next act, she poignantly plays a fastidious older woman looking for work in a job market that favors young men.

Martha Plimpton makes the biggest leap -- going from the pope to a rebellious, dull-witted teenager trying to find her way in life and not succeeding. And there's astonishing chameleonlike work by Marisa Tomei, first as the Victorian traveler, and then as Marlene's embittered sister, a woman who stayed behind in the hinterlands while her sister went on to a rewarding career in London.

The showdown occurs in the play's third act, a boozy verbal slugfest where resentment overwhelms the two siblings in a fight worthy of Edward Albee or Eugene O'Neill -- but with more political overtones.

The other cast members who contribute memorable portraits include Mary Catherine Garrison, Jennifer Ikeda and Ana Reeder, hilarious as that gruff Brueghel creation.

"Top Girls" is Churchill's second New York production this season -- the first being the short, but exasperating "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?"

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