“What has one accomplished if success is achieved in a destructive manner and at great personal cost?” asks Renaissance Theaterworks Artistic Director Suzan Fete. Her question references the company’s upcoming production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, which she directs and which marks the conclusion of the theater’s 25th season. Renaissance is Milwaukee’s only women-founded and women-run professional theater company, and Top Girls suits well its advocacy for gender parity.
Churchill’s Obie-winning drama places us in the world of Marlene, a British executive who has just bested her male peers for a promotion to a high-level management position. She celebrates with a dinner party including five women from literature, history and myth, and these characters later transform into the women with whom Marlene interacts in her contemporary life. Using layered, atemporal storytelling, Churchill gets at the heart of the dilemma faced by professional women both in 1982 and today: how to maintain compassion and ethicality in a male-dominated world of business that continually holds them to standards not imposed on their male peers.
Musicality and Societal Interrogation
Churchill’s prolific career spans nearly six decades, and she is recognized as a luminary in drama examining societal abuses and power dynamics through experimental theatrical forms. The British Council’s literature division describes Churchill’s dramaturgy as “the staging of desire, and more particularly the desires of those members of society who are least able to realize them … the desires of the oppressed, and most often, of women.”
The Council compares her style to that of Bertolt Brecht in its preference for episodic storytelling over traditional suspenseful plotting; her plays “tend to be constructed from many loosely connected scenes which do not necessarily ‘join up’ seamlessly with each other, but rather build up, through patterning, a general picture.” Churchill’s works also often include “juxtaposition of two radically discontinuous theatrical worlds.” In Top Girls, the fantastical opening dinner party contrasts markedly with the more realistic following sequences. Given this structure, audience members are placed within a dialectic and challenged to determine the connection between parts for themselves.
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The script’s unusual storytelling mode is mirrored in its nomenclature, and Fete comments on the unique challenges this poses to her cast; they’re contending with a script full of slashes indicating overlapping dialogue and asterisks tracking which lines relate to others. “It’s not the kind of play you can practice on your own. It’s very musical. The cool thing about that is that, left to its own devises, the musicality will come out on its own,” Fete says. “At first we played with altering some of the punctuation, but once we got further in, it became pretty clear that it’s written perfectly, and you can’t alter a comma.”
Ongoing Relevance
Describing her overall vision for the production, Fete says, “The idea of this play is that all of us are obsessed with success … Caryl Churchill said that she wants the absence of what is in her plays to have a presence, and I think what is absent in Top Girls is the ethic of compassion and caring.” Fete notes, too, that the various supporting characters must be fully realized so that the audience sees Marlene as part of a larger struggle: “If we see her situation as a piece of history, just like all these others, then it becomes bigger than just her story and bigger than just the oppression of women.”
In both its direction and design, the production highlights the still-pressing socio-political issues that Churchill presented in 1982. Scenic designer Stephen Hudson-Mairet’s opening projection backdrop, for instance, features images of iconic British women of the play’s time period with Margaret Thatcher front and center.
“It’s shocking how much the Reagan-Thatcher years echo today in the idea of the individual without responsibility for society,” Fete says. “Many of the things that were talked about in England and here, too, with Ronald Reagan, were ‘We don’t need social programs.’” The play’s central question, Fete says, is “What do we owe the people that come here looking for a better life and children that have not committed any crime except to be born?”
Fete notes, “Child poverty increased 40% during the time that Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. I’m afraid that that’s the direction that we’re going in now: so many programs being cut, education being decimated, arts funding gone. And yet we’re the richest country in the world.” Like the state of the world, the challenges presented in Top Girls are clear, but the solutions remain to be determined.
Top Girls runs April 6-29 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, call 414-291-7800 or visit r-t-w.com.
