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by Evan Placey, directed by Esther Jun

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

April 25-May 27, 2018

“We girls should stick together”

The Tarragon Theatre has made an odd choice to conclude its 2017/18 season.  Girls Like That by Evan Placey, a Canadian now resident in Britain, is written for an audience of adolescents and yet the Tarragon is presenting it for an audience of adults.  The play is so clearly intended to hit a series of discussion topics and it makes its points so broadly that one would more likely expect to see it at Young People’s Theatre rather than the Tarragon.  Yet, many plays seen at YPT, including Placey’s own Scarberia from 2016, are far more subtle than Girls Like That.  The main pleasure of the evening is watching the ensemble work of the excellent cast directed  by Esther Jun. 

In 2016 Placey published his play in a collection entitled Girls Like That and other plays for teenagers, so the Tarragon should really not have been in doubt about Placey’s intended audience.  Placey focusses on two main topics.  One is the deleterious effect of new technology on social interactions among teenagers.  The second is the total lack of awareness of feminism among female teenagers today.  The first topic has now been covered by numerous plays for teenagers.  The second one might think a rather presumptuous topic for a male writer, no matter how much a feminist ally he is. 

The action follows the lives of seven girls admitted to St. Helen’s School, an elite private school for children who are deemed to “think outside the box”.  Placey proceeds to demonstrate that thinking outside the box is exactly what these girls do not do.  Instead, as happens in schools and other kinds of institutions, the girls, separated from the boys until high school, establish a pecking order with one girl at the top, another at the bottom and all the rest ranged somewhere in between.  In case we doubt that is what the girls are doing, Placey has one girl whose parents are farmers explain how hens in a barnyard form a literal pecking order among themselves.  The farmers do not intervene unless one of the hens risks being pecked to death. 

The 20 girls girls at St. Helen’s in a given year remain as a group from their first year through high school.  This is supposed to cement the bonds of friendship among them, but, as Placey shows, it also cements the hierarchy that the girls establish on first meeting each other.  While most of the action takes place when the girls are 16, Placey includes flashbacks to when they are 5, 8 and 11 and one flash-forward to when they’re 45.  The hierarchy already forms when the girls are only 5 relegating Scarlett (Shakura Dickson), the only named girl, at the bottom. 

The main event of the play is the day when the girls are 16 and a nude photo of Scarlett appears on a social media website.  The girls condemn the photo but also immediately share it so that within a few hours everyone in the school has seen it and Scarlett has been labelled an outcast for being a “slut”.  No one bothers to ask Scarlett how the photo came to be taken, who posted it or how she feels.  Rather, none of the girls wants to associate with someone involved in such scandalous behaviour.

When the girls notice that the only boy in school who does not want to look at the photo is Russell, the boy universally acknowledged as the most handsome and desirable in school, the girls assume that Scarlett and he have been having sex.  When a nude photo of Russell soon appears on everyone’s phone, this seems to confirm the girls’ opinion.  Placey makes sure that we notice the double standard the girls abide by in condemning a girl for her nude photo but in admiring a boy for his.

After rather belabouring the various ways in which the girls shame and ostracize Scarlett, Russell’s actual girlfriend suddenly turns up at school and the girls goad her into fighting Scarlett.  When they notice Scarlett is being badly beaten, no girl takes action to intervene.  (Time to recall how farmers do not intervene in the hens’ pecking of each other.)  When Scarlett is transferred to another school and then goes missing, all the girls assume the worst, yet none express any feeling of complicity in what has happened.

While the girls’ treatment is meant to be condemned, Placey depicts their pettiness, unfounded suspicions and hypocrisy in so caricatured a manner that the play is more comically satiric than tragic.  To condemn the girls even further in our eyes, most of their interactions take place in and around their least favourite class, which happens to be history, where the teacher, in vain, tries to interest them in women’s struggle to get the vote.  The girls judge the history teacher the most boring in the school and retain nothing that she says.  Women’s right to vote has some unknown connection to “jets” as one girl opines. 

To underscore the school girls’ lack of the knowledge of women’s struggle for equality even more, Placey intersperses the action with four vignettes of women from 1928, 1945, 1969 and 1985, a woman who in each case calls out the unfairness of a male-dominated society.  Why these vignettes appear is not made clear until the very end. 

Also interspersed with the action are sequences when the girls dance to popular music, especially rap, in which the lyrics refer to self-proclaimed “bitches” who have come to dominate all the other “hos” around them.  These sections, choreographed by Alyssa Martin in music video style and performed with verve by the ensemble, are obviously meant to show that girls learn to see themselves as sexualized beings not just from images on the internet but from popular culture in general.

Conceptually the play has several flaws.  Most notably, Placey adopts the habit so common among playwrights with a message of ending his play with an extensive “in case you didn’t get it” speech to tell us exactly what the play was about.  Yet, after this speech which has all the heft of a conclusion, the play goes on to the flash-forward when the girls are 45.  Placey tries to give his negative view of the present generation a positive spin by showing the next generation of St. Helen’s girls uniting to help one of their own in trouble. 

That’s all very well but it contradicts the “barnyard hen pecking order” metaphor that suggests that just as hens always do the same thing in the same circumstances, so do women.  And, indeed, in the “Artist’s Note” by actor Nadine Bhabha, she recalls that around the time of puberty girls started to view each other not as companions but competition.  If competition is naturally built-in to a human beings as it is in animals why should it suddenly shift for the next generation?

Besides going on too long, having two endings and underlining every point it makes three times, the play still manages never to answer the initial question of how Scarlett’s nude photo got on the internet in the first place and then Russell’s.  Placey shows the girls so offended by Scarlett’s supposed sluttishness that no one will speak to her.  Realistically, though, wouldn’t at least one have asked her how it happened and why? 

Audiences, and women in particular, may find the play frustrating at best.  Though Placey sticks with the premise that all boys are stupid, it is still uncomfortable to watch a play by a male so minutely satirize the flaws of teenaged girls.  There is some reprieve when he has the cast play the boys and show us how truly stupid teenaged boys are, but Placey’s focus is still on the girls, their superficiality, their wilful ignorance, their hypocritical prudishness and their standing by to watch one of their own being hurt instead of doing anything to help.  This last he even compares to those who did nothing to help during the Holocaust.

What makes the play watchable despite its contradictions are the performances of the cast.  There is no weak link among the seven –  Tess Benger, Nadine Bhabha, Shakura Dickson, Allsion Edwards-Crewe, Lucy Hill, Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks and Rachel VanDuzer.  Under Esther Jun’s precise direction the ensemble forms a tight chorus both narrating their actions and speaking their lines in a strictly organized fashion.  Their dance interludes seem like extensions of the coordinated movement and speaking they have been doing.

Shakura Dickson’s Scarlett emanates a sense of hurt mixed with defiance throughout the play.  And her non-answer “Sure” to the girls’ questions shows, as she indeed later tells us, that Scarlett knows the girls will believe whatever they want to no matter what she says.  Though apparently the victim of the play, Dickson signals Scarlett’s unspoken rage so well that we know at least one of the St. Helen’s girls internally condemns the system.

In the four vignettes of women of different periods, four actors have a brief chance to shine on their own.  Of these the most effective is Allison Edwards-Crewe as the Woman of 1985 who calls out the sexual harassment she experiences from a lawyer as soon as it happens.

Who knows why the Tarragon is presenting a play meant for teens to an audience of adults, but the experience is disorienting and unsatisfying.  At least the production gives us a chance to look at the seven young women on stage and feel that we are having a glimpse of the amazing talent of the Canadian female actors of tomorrow.  We hope that they all find better showcases for their talent in future.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive

Photo: (from top) Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks, Shakura Dickson, Rachel VanDuzer, Lucy Hill, Tess Benger, Allison Edwards-Crewe and Nadine Bhabha; Shakura Dickson as Scarlett, Tess Benger, Rachel VanDuzer, Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks, Lucy Hill and Nadine Bhabha. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.