Churchill’s ‘Top Girls’ still packs feminist punch
ACT revives Margaret Thatcher-era play to open new season
Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” is best known less for what it’s about — an ambitious executive and the moral compromises she makes to get ahead in Margaret Thatcher-era Britain — than for its first scene, a self-contained fantasy vignette in which a woman has a dinner party with various semi-famous women of history and folklore. Seen anew at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, some of the then-contemporary trappings of the 1982 play now feel like a period piece, especially in Sarita Fellows’ brightly colored costumes. But it would be giving ourselves far too much credit as a society to pretend that the play’s themes of the horrible sacrifices women are expected to make in a patriarchal society are somehow behind us. It’s a great season for Churchill fans. In July the small Anton’s Well Theater Company in Berkeley produced the Bay Area premieres of two recent one-acts, “Escaped Alone” and “Here We Go.” Next come productions of “Cloud 9” at Custom Made Theatre Company, “Vinegar Tom” with Shotgun Players and “Escaped Alone” at Magic Theatre. Though there are no men in “Top Girls,” the burden of patriarchy pervades all the stories the women tell. All the personalities are larger than life in the dinner scene, and for the most part the notable women don’t listen to each other’s stories so much as jump off keywords to launch back into their own. Julia McNeal is particularly dogged in rerouting the conversation as Victorian traveler Isabella Bird, with unflappable good cheer. Monica Lin is wonderfully lively as 13th-century Japanese concubine-turned-Buddhist-nun Lady Nijo, and Rosie Hallett is amusingly animated as Pope Joan, merrily relating the tale of her rise and gruesome fall as if it’s just a terribly funny anecdote. Summer Brown is hilarious as rough-mannered, armored Dull Gret, the subject of a Bruegel painting, who only occasionally grunts terse observations. Monique Hafen Adams arrives late in the scene decked out like a Disney princess as Patient Griselda, a maddeningly obedient wife from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” Michelle Beck holds court as host Marlene, newly promoted at her employment agency. Although she keeps her hand in the conversation, she doesn’t have much to contribute to it. It’s only in later scenes that her breezy Teflon demeanor really comes into sharp focus. It’s an entertaining scene and a flamboyantly theatrical one, but it’s really in the second act that the ACT staging becomes much more sure-handed, as directed by Tamilla Woodard, who recently helmed the company’s marvelous “Men in Boats” at the Strand. Churchill’s play has an unconventionally fragmentary, nonlinear structure, and the scenes become gradually more naturalistic as it goes along. Here they also become considerably more grounded and emotionally resonant. Nina Ball’s sleek set really gets to show its stuff later on as well. The performers playing the time-tossed dinner guests all show up later as people in and around the employment agency who aren’t necessarily parallel characters. (The double casting is not specified in the script.) The most obvious parallel is Adams as Patient Griselda and again as the similarly submissive Mrs. Kidd, whose unseen husband is frustrated to have a woman promoted above him. These two roles go together so naturally that it’s almost a shock to recall that they were played by different people when the play debuted. Similarly, parallels between other characters are obscured slightly by being played by different people. The most intriguing and disturbing character is Angie, Marlene’s teenage niece, who seems much younger than she is, sometimes younger even than her preteen best friend played by Lily D. Harris. Portrayed by Gabriella Momah with unnerving, stalker-like intensity, Angie adores Marlene and detests her fed-up, longsuffering mother (compellingly down-to-earth Nafeeda Monroe). Much of the play’s power lies in its potently unanswered questions and the threads Churchill leaves hanging. After all, what’s at stake here is people’s whole lives, and pretending there’s any tidy resolution to that would be far too easy.