‘Bull’ shatters notions of female fragility
The history inside the play “Bull in a China Shop” twirls past like the flaring skirts of lovers lunging into embrace. It swishes and glides, from 1899 to the leadup to World War II, dipping in exactly when called for and then receding when it’s no longer convenient to have around. Like an ideal dancer, it’s perfectly happy to put its partner’s needs first, and you can see why. That partner in Aurora Theatre Company’s production is a very fun, complicated rollercoaster romance.
Forty years of history are still there, though, in Bryna Turner’s play about Mary Woolley (Stacy Ross), the president of Mount Holyoke College who transformed the school from seminary for docile wives to liberal arts college for freethinking minds, all while she was in a decadeslong romantic relationship with fellow academic Jeanette Marks (Leontyne MbeleMbong). So while the pair spar, then reconcile, then spar again in the way that perfectly matched, richly envisioned lovers do, history keeps peeping in for a flash, a dosido, that seems to suggest its march is easy and inevitable.
Of course, Woolley will get the job at Mount Holyoke, despite her protofeminist views, despite a fondness for declarations such as, “I am a revolution.” Of course, the school can ditch its mandatory chapel and classes in domestic services in favor of Marks’ courses on Virginia Woolf ’s “Orlando” and how students
should “doubt sex, doubt gender, doubt language, doubt everything.” Of course, Woolley will eventually go public with her true feelings about women’s suffrage, despite objections from Mount Holyoke’s donors. How could they not?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking a light approach to history, but in “Bull,” each successive scene seems to absolve itself of the stakes in the previous one, and real opposition takes the form only of Dean Welsh (Mia Tagano). She emits periodspecific bromides, whose tenor stays the same across decades, while Woolley and the right side of history get the privilege of contemporary slang, fbombs and all.
Yet you can mostly forgive deckstacking in the show, which opened Thursday, Nov. 14, under the direction of Dawn Monique Williams, partly because it’s a pleasure to see history centered on a queer narrative, but largely because Turner makes the relationship between Marks and Woolley uncannily true to life.
When MbeleMbong’s Marks sighs hopelessly about how she wants to die, how Mount Holyoke’s campus is stifling her smarts and creativity, how she gave up her career for her partner’s sake, how Woolley has forsaken their shared ideals for her own power, you might picture yourself or your own lover crumpling into a heap on your own sofa, complaining just to complain, but maybe also for something real.
Can we ever truly separate the grand from the squalid in human impulses? The historical figures of “Bull,” so starchy in their ovalshaped portraits, become quivering masses of contradictions and ambitions, selflove that’s seasoned and checked by the love of a worthy other. The show occasionally treats them just as blithely as it treats history, though, letting arguments peter out just as they flare. You might have multiple occasions to think, “Well, evidently that fight didn’t matter very much.”
Ulises Alcala’s costume design helps endow the power of these women, using semiotics that would have been understood at the time: culottes instead of a skirt here, a tie festooning an ensemble there. Buttons and blooming shoulders make everyone a whit militaristic. Lines cut severely across the body, perfect for women who mean business.
Jasmine Milan Williams as Pearl, an undergrad, and Rebecca Schweitzer as philosophy professor Felicity, both hangerson to Woolley and Marks’ vision for the college, each triumph as both support of and obstacle to the couple’s felicity.
For any who have not yet seen Williams’ work with Campo Santo or Crowded Fire or other local companies, she, here as Marks’ fangirl, announces herself as an extraordinary theatrical talent. When her lines dive into the most wretched, the most incomprehensible territory of human feeling, summoning murderous rage and throbbing lust all in one great cloud, she lets each lightning bolt of impulse bellow and build toward something greater. “I loathe you, which means I love you, which means I loathe you,” she seems to say, because it’s all extreme, and she can’t quite pick which, and each gets spurred by the other.
That’s the sort of story “Bull” suggests, that Woolley and Marks could never have told about each other, in their own time, which is exactly why it feels so fluttery and glorious and longawaited now.