Whirlwind look at historical `Wives' plays in Berkeley
Women erased over time make return in Aurora Theatre's latest
There's a fascinating moment late in the Jaclyn Backhaus play “Wives” in which a character's deceased grandparents attempt to tell her the story of their lives entirely through a litany of feelings. It's a lovely sequence, but what's interesting about it is that, in a sense, the whole play is like that.
Not a whole lot happens in “Wives,” now playing in its West Coast premiere at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company. It's a series of four vignettes set in different time periods, thematically linked around the women whose stories have been erased in the histories written by and about men.
We spend a little time in 16th-century France with Catherine de' Medici and Diane de Poitiers, the wife and mistress, respectively, of King Henri II. We hang out after Ernest Hemingway's death with his widow Mary Hemingway and ex-wives Martha Gellhorn and Hadley Richardson. In the time of British Colonial rule of India, we see the Maharaja of Jaipur with his wife the Maharani and concubine, the healer Roop Rai. Then we jump to the present day for a meeting of a brand-new college campus witches' club.
We don't learn much about the characters, though with most of the historical figures the resources are out there if your curiosity is piqued enough to read about them. These women often made invisible in history, usually relegated to a supporting role, come to the forefront here, but their stories aren't told in the play either. Mostly we're given a taste of how they might have felt about that.
Playwright Backhaus should be familiar to Bay Area theater audiences from her rollicking allwomen tale of exploration and survival “Men on Boats” that was so dazzling at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater four years ago.
“Wives,” which premiered at New York's Playwrights Horizons in 2019, is a less cohesive work, but the rough character sketches in it are intriguing enough to make you want to know more. Watching the play is almost like briefly meeting people at a party that seem cool, but you didn't have time to glean much about them. The vignettes don't cross over or connect with each other, although there's a halfhearted attempt to tie them together at the end.
The humor is often very broad and goofy in director Lavina Jadhwani's staging, but (at least as seen on opening night) the pacing is sometimes slack, and it takes a little while for the performers to find their footing.
The cast is generally strong. Jasmine Sharma is a wickedly clever Queen Catherine, especially when she and Anisha Jagannathan's Diane are exchanging barbs. Jagannathan is a blasé and grounded Martha Gellhorn, mocking Hemingway's literary style with Sharma's exaggeratedly drunken Hadley and Rebecca Schweitzer's mournful Mary. Schweitzer is an amusingly almost Valley Girl-sounding college club founder, a garrulous cook and a sputtering priggish British functionary. Kunal Prasad is comically laid back as both the Maharaja and King Henri and pointedly self-important as a posthumous Hemingway.
Backhaus' choice to make the dialogue unapologetically anachronistic is a smart one. Some of the funniest moments spring from unexpected use of modern slang and mannerisms in historical settings.
Courtney Flores' lovely costumes do a lot of the work in establishing each period setting, assisted by small changes to Mikiko Uesugi's versatile set.
At the end of some sections are some surprisingly limp ensemble songs to lackluster canned music, although otherwise composer Leela Oleszkiewicz's incidental music underscoring the action is often engaging and nicely varied in style.
Ultimately this isn't the play that finally gives these too-long-sidelined women of history their due. It asserts their awesomeness in dialogue more than it really shows us who they were and exactly how they were awesome. But it certainly succeeds in making us want to know more. In that way it makes a great case for other plays yet to be written that might bring these “wives” further out of the shadows and into the light.