Mad Cow Theatre’s production of Top Girls was the first Caryl Churchill play I’ve seen other than Cloud Nine, which I’ve seen twice. While Churchill is an amazingly influential playwright, in the US, Cloud Nine is almost certainly her most performed play (not without good reason) so it was great to see another of her works on stage.

Top Girls is an interesting pastiche play, with an ahistorical opening, then a major plotline carried out through fragmented scenes which come together to give a complex assessment of the kind of Thatcherite second wave feminism that identified women’s liberation with a woman at the head of a corporate board of directors (even if that meant that neoliberal capitalism went merrily along crushing millions of other women). The first scene brings together a set of historical/mythological women, including the Victorian era travel writer Isabella Bird, the 13^th century Japanese imperial concubine Lady Nijo, a militant (and taciturn) woman taken from a Pieter Breughel painting named Dull Gret, the legendary 9^th century Pope Joan, and the mythical Patient Griselda. These women congregate at a party for Marlene (a 1980s Thatcherite), who has just been promoted at the Top Girls employment agency. They talk about their various experiences with men, trying to determine their own lives, sexuality, violence, etc. throughout the meal.

Following this scene, all of the action takes place in the present (meaning the early 1980s). Marlene is shown in her office at the Top Girls employment agency, where she and her colleagues discuss the problems and possibilities of placing various women in different types of jobs. The related plot strand is her niece Angie, who detests her mother Joyce and yearns to run away to live with the wealthy, successful aunt she admires more than anyone else in the world. When Angie eventually does end up in Top Girls, having come unannounced to live with her aunt, Marlene is less than thrilled. The final scene flashes back a year to when Angie developed her fascination with Marlene. On a visit that Angie arranged without telling her mother, Marlene gives Angie a dress and recounts some of her travels in America and elsewhere. But Marlene and Joyce fight, rehashing the contemporary battles between labor and the emerging 1890s financial class. Marlene defends the monetarist position that anyone can succeed if they just work hard enough and have sufficient internal fortitude, while Joyce follows their father’s militant labor rhetoric about the importance of unions and working-class solidarity. During this argument, Marlene’s horrible secret is revealed, that not only has she given up real relationships with her sister and mother in the name of her career, Marlene also gave up her daughter Angie to be raised by Joyce so that she could pursue her professional ambitions.

The Mad Cow Theatre production, directed by Tony Simotes, did an excellent job staging a play that presents quite a few challenges. One of the most substantial problems is with the first scene, where the characters continually talk over one another—beginning lines before other characters have finished, having fully audible side conversations, and arguing, questioning, or challenging simultaneously. The scene definitely moves more like a real dinner party than with the somewhat artificial stage convention of dialogue where each character waits to speak until the others have stopped. What makes this scene difficult is that it seems almost as through it weren’t designed for an audience—we do lose so many individual lines in the clamor—and yet it works really well on stage. The Mad Cow performers made the scene’s naturalness (or at least the naturalness of the party dialogue) work to their advantage in giving us a complex scene where the work of deciphering individual points was somewhat less significant than the complexity of the whole.

Following the first scene, the play becomes more realistic, though the plot also becomes more fragmented as it switches back and forth between the Top Girls agency and Joyce and Angie’s home. At the interval, I wasn’t a big fan of the fragmentation, but as the two storylines came together in the second Act, the play really started to click. The interconnections between the sets of scenes/spaces made increasing sense, especially with the culmination in the final scene. Fundamentally, this is a play about Marlene and the human relationships one has to give up to climb to the top of the neoliberal heap. Cynthia Beckert gave a great performance as Marlene, combining a tricky combination of aloof professionalism with a very human vulnerability, especially in the final scene when Marlene and Joyce gets drunk and Marlene begins to recognize just how much she’s had to give up to become the person she has.