12/6/2023 0 Comments Review sf top girls play![]() This very funny scene involves Pope Joan, the Victorian traveler Isabella Bird, the 13th-century Japanese courtesan turned Buddhist nun Lady Nijo, Dull Gret from Brueghel’s painting depicting a woman in armor running through hell and routing devils, and Patient Griselda, whose story is told in The Canterbury Tales! Then it’s back-and-forth between the temp office and then Joyce’s home.ĭon’t bolt at intermission, as some did at opening night, if you don’t understand this vacillation between Naturalism and Surrealism. In fact, Top Girls begins with a surrealist scene at a posh London restaurant in which Marlene impossibly brings together famous women from history to celebrate her promotion by drinking and trading war stories. In her plays, themes of gender identity, feminist politics, and class struggle have straightforward scenes interspersed with dreamlike incidents which at first glance seem to have nothing to do with the story. Yet be aware before you go that Churchill writes with a non-linear structure. The mélange of magical moments that swirls throughout the production more than compliments the brilliance of the play. This quiet, naked moment not only articulates Churchill’s themes - a woman’s precarious balance between work and personal life and getting ahead surviving finding fulfillment in a male-dominated world - but it is part of a tremendous scene in a play pocked with them. Nafeesa Monroe, who plays Joyce in A.C.T.’s superlative revival of English playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1982 feminist manifesto, Top Girls, doesn’t go for self-pity or righteousness in this moment before slumping her head into her hands, she simply gazes with a careworn, faraway look, but we can see the millennia of female strife in her eyes. After years away from her estranged sister, Marlene makes an unexpected visit, but the sisters’ acrimonious relationship causes them to have a particularly pernicious argument, after which Marlene exits to say good-night to her niece in another room. Marlene escaped their dysfunctional home years ago and is now a newly promoted managing director at an employment agency named Top Girls. ![]() For the most part, Joyce, a working class Englishwoman in Ipswich is not a sympathetic or likeable person: She is annoyed by her teenage daughter Angie (who admittedly is belligerent and daft), and begrudging toward her sister, Marlene, whom she views as a ball-busting, career-driven, selfish, soulless abandoner (not that there isn’t some truth in that). ![]()
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