May 10th, 2008 admin
The crucial top girl in theater activist Caryl Churchill’s complex Top Girls, being revived by Manhattan Theatre Club at the Biltmore, never appears on stage. She’s former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was setting the country’s political tone during the early 1980’s when the play was written in what appears to be a quiet rage. Unfortunately, one of the besetting problems of the play — which 26 years later has lost more than some of its topical impact — is that only late in the third act does it become clear what Churchill has been driving at. She is taking a bluntly critical look at Thatcher’s dehumanizing social programs and their far-reaching divisive effects, especially on the country’s women.
Whether audiences even make it to the third act of James Macdonald’s visually beautiful production — courtesy of Tom Pye’s fluid, ethereal sets and Laura Bauer’s costumes — is another issue. In act one, liberated modern woman Marlene (the fine Elizabeth Marvel) hosts five prominent women from different periods at a sumptuous Casa Bianca dinner: Pope Joan (Martha Plimpton) hailing from the ninth century, Victorian traveler Isabella Bird (Marisa Tomei), Patient Griselda (Mary Catherine Garrison) of Chaucer and Petrarch fame, 13th-century emperor’s concubine and Buddhist nun Lady Nijo (Jennifer Ikeda), and Flemish warrior Dull Gret (Ana Reeder).
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