Theater Catch-up #2: "Top Girls" at Keegan Theatre

Sunday (November 26) afternoon and once again I am at the theater.  This time back to little Keegan Theatre on Church Street just east of Dupont Circle in the District.  I had attended two of their productions last year, and this was my first for this season.  The play was "Top Girls" written by Caryl Churchill and first debuted in London in 1982.  Prior to  going, I had never heard of the play before.  It opened in the 3rd year of the Thatcher government and is a treatise on the changing role of women in society.  Presented in three acts, it is the story of Marlene, who had just accepted a promotion at her employment services company over a man who has more experience than she, along with her own story of facing the ghosts of her past that include an illegitimate daughter and the estranged sister who raised the child as her own.

I was immediately reminded of the seminal feminist art piece by Judy Chicago "The Dinner Party" that premiered in 1979, and I'm certain the Churchill drew upon it in conceiving her opening act.  It depicts a sort of dream wherein to celebrate her promotion, Marlene throws a dinner party for 5 iconic and historical (though some are fictional) women from the past: #1 - 10th century Pope Joan, #2 - 13th century Japanese concubine, Lady Nijo, #3 Pgriselda from Chaucer, #4 - Dull Gret from a Pieter Breughel painting, and #5 19th century world traveler/explorer, Idabella Bird.  Act II introduces us to Marlene's niece (daughter) Angie (who is rather a dullard and more than a little sinister) and her sister, Joyce in the first scene.  In the second scene we meet Marlene's office co-workers and in one particularly pointed exchange, the wife of the man who she passed over with her promotion.  Act III slips back one year to a reunions between the two sisters clandestinely orchestrated by Angie.  It turns into a night of drinking and arguing and ends in ambiguity.

You have to love contemporary theater.

OR, as the director writes in the program notes: "Some argue that contemporary art isn't something to "get" but rather somethings to GET AT YOU.  Well... "Top Girls" gets at me.  It hits the heart before the head.  ...It challenges us to consider the path we are carving through history... [and] Who gets left behind on the road to progress?"

Masterfully acted; with a steam that only increased as the play progressed.  It is the best thing I've seen to date at Keegan.  The women play multiple roles with the exception of Karina Hilleard who is Marlene.  Two stood out in particular.  Caroline Dubberly who dines as the Hell conquering mythis Dull Gret (sounds like a Cardasian captian, but came off more like a Klingon general!), and then transforms into the learning disabled teenage Angie.  She was frighteningly compelling in both roles.  Susan Marie Rhea, who took on the insatiable Isabella Bird with her litany of fantastical reminiscences of her life as adventurer extraordinaire, and then became ironically, Joyce, the forgotten sister who was left behind to raise Marlene's bastard daughter as her own in the village of their birth among other pedestrian braveries.

The big negative to the Keegan is that it's a small theater and designed to seat skinny people!  Even averagely mesomorphic folk ar tightly packed in.  And so like it not, the experience is not only theatrical, bu aviary--like being on a three hour flight to Dallas where, because of the two intermissions (and my seat one off of the aisle), I am also rising and sitting like I'm at Easter mass at some Romanesque little Chapel.  I accept this (and the 2 inches of space between my knees and the back of the seat in front of me) for the price of admission.  Keegan is one of the most cost efficient theaters in the region for price to quality, in spite of the inconveniences.