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<b>written by Clare Booth Luce, directed by Alisa Palmer
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 29-October 9, 2010
</b>
“Jungle Red"
The Shaw Festival’s revival of “The Women” serves as a magnificent showcase for the unparalleled female acting talent the Festival boasts. No other theatre company in English Canada, including the Stratford Festival in its present state, could come close to mustering the 19 women skilled enough to carry off a play of such a large scale that is so dependent on a unified style. Clare Boothe Luce’s biting 1936 satire of backstabbing among upper-crust society women has inevitably dated in some respects, but director Alisa Palmer has found in the play an equally pointed parallel satire of deleterious effects of wealth.
The play focusses on a good woman, Mary Haines, happily married for twelve years with two children. Before meet Mary we meet her friends--Sylvia, Edith, Peggy and Nancy--as they play bridge in Mary’s home. Sylvia, the head gossip-monger, has learned through her manicurist that Mary’s husband Stephen is having an affair with a shop-girl named Crystal. As a “kindness” Sylvia sends Mary to visit her manicurist, nominally to get the same “Jungle Red” polish she sports, but hoping that the manicurist will pass on the same gossip. The play develops into a struggle within Mary between what she and her mother want (to bear with Stephen’s indiscretion until it burns itself out) or to follow the pressure of her female “friends” to divorce Stephen and move on. When news of Stephen’s affair are published in the papers, Mary feels she has no choice but divorce despite the fact that she still love Stephen and feels that, deep down, he still loves her. In the end once-innocent Mary learns how to play the same nasty game as her gossipy friends, shows them up and gets what she really wants on her own terms.
It is typically of the Shaw Festival that even in a show with so many roles, there is not one weak link in the cast. Jenny Young, who just last year was excellent as a homespun country girl in “Moon for the Misbegotten”, shows that she can be just as effective a high-society wife like Mary Haines. She has a dignity of carriage and speech that instantly sets her apart from her supposed friends but that is appealing enough to make us see how these women would want to be friends with her. Her scenes with her mother (Sharry Flett in a typically sympathetic performance) and her daughter (the talented 12-year-old Celeste Brillon) brings out a dimension of familial responsibility that we see in none of Mary’s social peers. Mary may begin the play as an innocent, but Young shows how painful it is for Mary to accept that the law of the jungle applies even in her social class.
Deborah Hay, so wonderfully comic last year as the not so dumb blonde in “Born Yesterday”, turns in another comic performance as the acerbic Sylvia Fowler, whose kindest remarks always have a barb attached. Her defection from Mary’s side as the play progresses only shows amoral she is beneath her blithely witty surface. Hay is adept at both verbal and physical comedy (note the hilarious exercise scene in Act 1). She portrays Sylvia as so inured to sarcasm that she speaks largely unaware of the insults she broadcasts.
Among Sylvia’s colourful circle of friends are the outlandish Countess de Lage, a fabulously rich American who seems to acquire wealth by strategic marriages. Wendy Thatcher is an absolute hoot as the Countess, whom she plays as a sort of aging Zsa Zsa Gabor with a southern accent. Moya O’Connell is excellent as the voluptuous gold-digger Crystal Allen. She conveys her callousness and ill-breeding, but beneath that suggests a desperation for a better life. As Miriam Aarons, Nicola Correia-Damude is a worldlier version of Crystal, who calculates more precisely whom to ensnare with her charms. Among the non-sex-pots are are two happily married women, Edith Potter and Peggy Day--the first who is always pregnant, the second longing to have children. Jenny L. Wright is very funny as the completely unmotherly Edith, perpetually complaining about her condition and regarding her numerous offspring as nuisances. As a friend asks her, “Are you Catholic or just careless?” Beryl Bain plays Peggy as a wide-eyed innocent who admires Edith while somehow filtering out her stream of anti-maternal invective. As a balance to all these actual or would-be monied housewives is Kelli Fox as Nancy Blake, a single woman and writer who earns her own living, who looks on the others with pity and curiosity as if she is studying them for one of her novels.
The rest of the cast play multiple roles, but all have a chance to shine at least once. Melanie Phillipson has a fine turn as Mary’s Irish maid Jane, who vividly relates to the cook both sides of an argument between Mary and Stephen. Lisa Codrington has the choice part as the manicurist Olga, who spills all the gossip about Mrs. Haines, unaware that it is Mrs. Haines she is addressing. Patty Jamieson’s biggest role is Lucy, the hardened proprietor of a hotel for divorcées in Reno, who has seen it all. And Helen Taylor has an important role as the obstetrical nurse for Edith, who counters Edith’s complaints about childbirth with a grim tale (seemingly referring to herself) of what having a child out of hospital without anaesthesia is like.
Alisa Palmer recently directed the renowned feminist play “Top Girls” by Caryl Churchill for Soulpepper in 2007 and 2008. That play begins with a scene gathering women from many different historical periods, fictional and not, to celebrate the promotion of the the career woman at the play’s centre. In a similar way, Palmer begins “The Women” with a prologue in which we see the entire cast dressed in costumes of all different classes to suggest the universality of Luce’s play. Just as Churchill criticizes women who in fighting to the top adopt ruthless habits that are no different than those of men, Palmer’s production of “The Women” emphasizes Luce’s satire of women, who already having wealth, compete against each other for the best men they can catch. While Churchill’s top girls define themselves by outdoing men with men's own means, Luce’s women define themselves by what material gains they can gain from marriage or affairs to move themselves up the social hierarchy. In “The Women” Palmer makes sure that remarks of Mary’s maid or Edith’s nurse or Lucy the hotel-keeper or Nancy the novelist give a critical context to the whole world of these women who have the money and leisure to waste in intrigues and cat-fights. As in Churchill it is a given that men are hopeless cads, but also as in Churchill women who grasp as do men after rank and prestige are no better.
William Schmuck’s design for the show is outstanding. For anyone who likes lots of costumes, both beautiful and outrageous, Schmuck’s innumerable outfits will certainly surfeit any taste. He superbly finds exactly the right gown to express the nature of each character, with Mary in plain, sensible wear and Sylvia in a host of outré ensembles. He creates the numerous locations in the play with much use of sets on platforms that often slide in or recede with the actors in place, suggesting that the world of the play is both fragmented and a gigantic game.
“The Women” is a big, laugh-out-loud play full of witty zingers. But in the midst of the catty humour, lavish décor and fabulous fashion, Palmer makes sure we see Mary’s situation as the struggle for decency and real feeling against all the greed, artifice and excess around her. In the first lines of the play Sylvia asks, “What do we all have money for? Why do we keep servants?” If the only use of such freedom is to ruin other pople’s lives, Luce asks, “Why indeed?”
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jenny Young, Jenny L. Wright, Kelli Fox and Deborah Hay. ©Emily Cooper.
<b>2010-08-07</b>
<b>The Women</b>