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Top Girls

by Caryl Churchill
review by in SF Weekly by Michael Scott Moore (June 19, 2002)

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Top Girls
The costs and difficulties of female ambition are examined in this staging of
another Churchill play
BY MICHAEL SCOTT MOORE

Caryl Churchill seems to be the soup of the
day: Crowded Fire is offering a cup-size
production of Top Girls to go with the
Berkeley Rep's bowl of Cloud Nine (see
above). Churchill wrote both plays in the
years around 1980, when Margaret Thatcher
came to power, and when a character in Top
Girls mentions her by name you realize
Thatcher's political presence -- her era of
conservatism, her grocer's-daughter pluck --
informs the entire play. Marlene is a London
professional rising fast in the Top Girls
employment agency. Her sister Joyce is a
poor housewife stuck in their hometown,
raising a girl named Angie. They haven't seen
each other in years because of a bitter secret,
which Angie wants to unravel. The play looks
at the costs and difficulties of female ambition
in the late 20th century, but starts with a
dinner featuring prominent women from the
last 1,200 years: Pope Joan ("thought to have
been pope, disguised as a man, between
854-856"), the Japanese Lady Nijo, and
Chaucer's Patient Griselda, among others.
The dinner is the most interesting but also the
weakest part of the production; Rebecca
Novick's uneven cast does better with
modern girls than it does with obscure
historical ones. But the modern scenes are nicely paced. Juliet Tanner does
sharp work as Kit, a rude and scrappy lass who won't let Angie dominate
her; Cassie Beck is also charming as Angie, and Mollena Williams does a
smooth, professional Win, who works with Marlene (actually under Marlene)
at Top Girls. The dense, maybe overlong script is stronger than Cloud Nine,
and it still holds up as a portrait of a changing society, even if Margaret
Thatcher is gone.
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