Theater

Top Girls

Last Friday night Mike and I went to see Top Girls at Studio 115 on campus. I was a little skeptical at first because I didn’t know if I would enjoy it. Mike was also wary about going to a “feminist” play. But in the end we both looked at each other and said, “That was good!”

The play is about a career driven woman named Marlene who works for an employment agency called Top Girls. The play starts out with a dream like sequence where Marlene is having dinner with five historical “top girls” who are supposedly there to congratulate her on her promotion in the company. Throughout the dream the five women get progressively more drunk and emotional as they each discuss their pasts and the different experiences they have had. Although the women have accomplished much during their lifetimes and hold famous status for one reason or another, it is soon revealed that each of them has also suffered in various ways.

After the dream sequence ends the play jumps into the present day, which is actually the early 1980’s. Marlene is at a desk interviewing women for work in the highly competitive job field full of men. After this scene, the story of Angie begins as she and her friend Kit hide from Angie’s mother Joyce. We learn that Angie hates her mother and fantasizes about killing her. She is a troubled teenager who has dropped out of school and does not have any friends her own age. She looks up to her Aunt Marlene and wants to be around her as much as she can. Later in the story it is discovered that Marlene is actually Angie’s mother and her sister Joyce has been taking care of Angie all these years as her own daughter. Marlene and her sister Joyce are at odds with each other during the play and eventually have an argument which allows them to get things off their minds that they had been bottling up. The play continues and we start to realize that, although Marlene might be a successful business woman, she had to give up her daughter and cut ties with many of her other family members just to achieve it.

The tone of the play seemed a bit dark and the attitude was one of struggling to find happiness, or just to survive in the world. I think the intention of the play was to make the audience question the abilities of working women. Can they be aggressive, cutthroat, successful career women and also have a family life with loving, nurturing, and kind attributes? I also think the intention was to show that sometimes getting what you want in life requires that you sacrifice something else that may also be very important.

I was impressed with the acting abilities of the cast because they made the show very realistic and I found myself caught up in the story line and sitting on the edge of my seat. Since the play was set in London, the cast was required to take on British/English accents. I thought that was interesting, and maybe even a little hard to do, especially being unfamiliar with talking that way or using words not necessarily a part of everyday American vocabulary. I was also amazed at the way they could focus on their lines with as much overlapping dialogue that there was. But the one thing that really impressed me is the way the cast didn’t let little mistakes affect the rest of their performance. If someone made a slip-up, they moved on with their lines as if it did not happen. For instance, there was one instance where Angie and Kit were supposed to spit on their hands and then shake each other’s hands to make a pact. I don’t think they were really supposed to spit, but Angie actually did. This could have made Kit start laughing or get distracted or grossed out, but she went with it and made it seem like it was supposed to happen. She merely wiped the drop of saliva that landed on Angie’s chin and stayed in character. Also, at one point Marlene seemed to have had a tickle in her throat and it appeared as though she was going to have a coughing fit. Luckily during the scene there was actual water on the table she could drink as though it was part of the play and napkin on the table she could use to wipe her dripping nose. It seemed like it could have been rehearsed, but it wasn’t. The last thing that amazed me is that the characters didn’t get out of their “zone” even when the fire alarm went off. The play had just begun and then all of a sudden a loud, abrasive alarm and flashing lights went off. Everyone in the building (cast and crew included) was ushered outside into the cold night where we had to wait for nearly 40 minutes until the alarm could get turned off. This could have been a huge irritation or distraction for the cast, but when the play eventually started again, they continued strong and didn’t let the instance affect them at all. I felt like the characters really “lived their parts” and maintained a certain degree of “spiritual concentration.”

The stage that the cast performed on was very simple. Studio 115 is a small room fit for a small audience. The props mostly consisted of black boxes and flat, black boards used for tabletops. The lighting was very simple as well. The most extreme use of light was when a spotlight was needed and another time when there was some flashing that resembled lighting. The sound of the play was great and I enjoyed the music they used, which was 1980’s song renditions to fit each character and scene. The costumes were also fairly basic but I highly enjoyed how each character from the dinner scene changed their clothes in front of the audience and became a new character. To me this kind of signified that the characters were parallel in some way. It was interesting that they essentially used the same attire from the first scene to create an entirely different costume for the following scenes. The production elements were not extravagant in any way compared to other plays that I have seen. But I honestly didn’t think it mattered much as long as the acting was well done, which, in this case it was.

Overall I think the play was well done and Mike and I were both happy we went to see it. Watching the performers made me want to become a better actress for the scenes we are working on in my acting class. I also felt inspired to go watch more plays! I think there is something to be said about live theater that just does not compare to watching a movie. If a play can capture my complete attention and draw me into the story and impact me in a way that makes me think about myself and my life with a different perspective, then it has accomplished something. And I feel like this particular play did just that.