Clare Booth Luce's "The Women" @ ACT Theatre
Initially, we were a little surprised to hear that ACT--A Contemporary Theatre--was putting on Clare Booth Luce's The Women. Although having debuted in 1936 placed the play in the Modern canon, its view of women is about as un-p.c. as they come: in short, the play presents women as gossipy and back-stabbing, assumes marital infidelity is a function of the Y chromosome, and ends with a note suggesting that for the sake of a healthy marriage, a woman needs to cut herself off from female friends. Sex in the City this ain't.
But watching the play--a spoof on the relationships of wealthy Manhattan cafe society women of the 1930s--we couldn't help but feeling it was all so depressingly contemporary. While it's true that most of us don't have servants, this tale of women living in leisure and excess, for whom blowing money is their main pursuit, seems all too apropos today. In fact, the only thing that feels outdated is the chorus of working class women, the servants and beauticians and shopgirls and nurses, all of whom are given their chance to take pot-shots at the affectless cafe society women who whine and moan about how miserable their lives of leisure are. Call it democratization: In a society obsessed with misbehaving celebutantes, where entire reality shows are devoted to women tarting themselves up to catch a wealthy man and jump their class, and where, despite growing income inequality, the economy hums along, fueled by massive consumer spending on an ever expanding array of entertainment and beauty products, this play is less a mocking comment on the upper classes than a reasonable representation of our own lives, which is fairly depressing.
The action centers on a group of friends, the wives of well-off Manhattan businessmen. Sylvia Fowler (Julie Briskman) is the over-bearing, self-declared leader of the troop. When her manicurist lets slip the juicy tidbit that their friend Mary Haines' (Suzanne Bouchard) husband, Stephen, is keeping a mistress, she just can't wait to share the gossip. Once Mary finds out, her mother tells her to lay-off, that all men find a mistress, but that in order to protect her marriage, Mary should under no circumstances interfere and let things run their course. After a run-in with her husband's mistress, Crystal Allen (Jennifer Lyon), herself all too willing to stay the kept woman, one of Mary's friends, Edith Potter (Anne Allgood), lets the news slip to a society columnist. Once the news hits the tabloids, Mary threatens Stephen with divorce in a brinksmanship gambit to save her marriage and force him to abandon Crystal; too cowardly to choose, he lets her follow through with the divorce despite the fact the two remain in love. While Mary retreats to Reno (where the liberal divorce laws and distance from the tabloids help soften the scandal), her husband marries the mistress, only to have Mary set things straight and win him back two long years later.
While in sum total the play is about as sexist (in the contemporary sense) as they come--an indictment of women as catty bitches and little more--the production, with a phenomenal cast of some of Seattle's best female actors (the cast includes 16 female roles and no male), fights to find the human core of the roles, and many of the performers rise spectacularly to the occasion. Even if the play's thematic core offends our modern sensibilities, the performances make the individual choices the characters make within the play believable.
Two of the performances we were most impressed by were Suzanne Bouchard as Mary Haines and Anne Allgood as Edith Potter. We saw both earlier this year in ACT's production of Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House, a play with a far more contemporary outlook on gender. While Ruhl's script is phenomenal, we felt both actors struggled to make their characters more than one-dimensional. As if prompted by the need to make up for Luce's view of femininity, both explode in their roles. As an emotionally cold, job-obsessed surgeon in The Clean House, Bouchard never managed to present her character's growth and transformation, trapped by the wry, humorous dialogue she has to deliver. In The Women, in contrast, she takes Mary's transformation from an accepting, passive wife to the aggressive fighter who backstabs and betrays her way back to her husband, and somehow manages to keep Mary above the fray, a Machiavellan with a moral core. While feminists may cringe at a play that ends with a wife tearing down the homewrecker to win back a cheating husband she divorced two years prior, the fact that Bouchard executes the role and leaves us sympathetic to Mary is a feat.
Allgood likewise takes a role which feels like a stock character and gives a depth that dominates most scenes. In The Clean House, as Bouchard's mousy sister who uses domesticity as a safety blanket, Allgood likewise never quite managed the transformation of her character from introvert to extrovert. But in The Women, as Edith, she gives depth to a character who really shows no growth or development during the play. In a closing monologue, she puts the other women in their place by explaining that the key to her happiness has been her willingness to turn a blind eye to her husband's straying; while the others suffer the humiliation of divorce, she goes on quite happily in her own world. And where the others become harder, meaner people by their experience, her lack of change strikes the viewer as something of an achievement; there's a dignity to the person who doesn't rock the boat that the others lack.
Lastly, we can't close without mentioning the technical production: this show must have been a designer's wet-dream. The only limitation (and that includes money) on scenic designer Matthew Smucker was the necessity of so many scene changes. As such, the play relies on the increasingly standard device of a static, nondescript backdrop. But ACT used the production to debut its new, high-tech stage management system, with numerous moving platforms and trapdoor work. And if the number of scene changes limited Smucker, costumer designed David Zinn and his team took it as a challenge, producing a phenomenal number of original period costumes. Truly a remarkable job on the technical end.
"The Women" @ ACT Theatre // through Dec. 2 // tickets $10 (student) up to $54
Image: Susanna Wilson, Anne Allgood, Julie Briskman and Emily Cedergreen in “The Women” by Clare Boothe Luce at ACT – A Contemporary Theatre. Photo: Chris Bennion.
