Review: (Montreal / Theatre) Top Girls

Leni Parker (photo by Andrée Lanthier)

Top Girls reaches for gold
You might love or hate Churchill’s feminist play 
Sarah Deshaies
@sarahdeshaies

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

In career girl Marlene’s dream hosting gig, five top, barrier-breaking (but historically overlooked) women come to sup and celebrate. They are toasting Marlene’s promotion at a job placement agency, no mean feat for a woman during Thatcher’s reign in early ‘80s Britain.

There’s Lady Nijo (Leni Parker), a 13th century concubine from imperial Japan who travelled on foot for decades as a Buddhist nun, and Pope Joan (Lauryn Allman), a woman secretly in the top cleric’s job in the 800s. Dull Gret (France Rolland) is a gruff warrior woman, peeled right off of a Brueghel painting. There’s Victorian world traveller Isabella Bird (Julie Tamiko Manning) and Patient Griselda (Lucinda Davis), Chaucer’s obedient yet resolute wife.

The opening act of Caryl Churchill’s play is a dinner party tableau that evokes both Judy Chicago’s famous feminist table and The View’s cacophony of lady voices. Each dinner guest delves into stories about childbirth, fathers, death, lovers - but to illustrate how lonely they may have been in their own times, they chatter over one another at length. As one poignantly reminisces about her child, Isabella wades in: “I never had any children. I was fond of horses.”

Sunday Feature: Caitlin Murphy, Dramaturg for Top Girls

The Blood-Letting
When I first told my boyfriend I did dramaturgy, he thought it sounded like surgery for theatre
by Caitlin Murphy

Caitlin Murphy is a writer, director, dramaturg and regular reviewer for The Charlebois Post.  Most recently her play Fruits Unheard Of, about photographer Diane Arbus, was presented in New York City by Working Theatre Artists, and her story "The Perfect Bird" was featured at Urban Tales at the Centaur Theatre.  She has also written and directed four short films, three narrative and one documentary; Flushing Lacan (2010) and TOAST (2011) won the Jury Prize Awards at the Montreal ACTRA Short Film Festival. This summer her play Ladies Room will be presented at the London Ontario Fringe, and her most recent play LOTUS will premiere at the Montreal Fringe.  She will also be associate directing The Book of Judith with Sarah Garton Stanley.

When I first told my boyfriend I did dramaturgy, he thought it sounded like surgery for theatre.  
Not really, I laughed. Or was it?  

Regardless, he hit on an odd truism about the craft for me: I always end up stepping away from it, standing alongside it through analogy in an attempt to explain what it is. Unlike other theatre jobs that I could describe pretty easily head-on, dramaturgy sets me scrambling for similes, usually finding that so many fit. At least a little bit. Being a dramaturg is like being a cheerleader. It's like being a curator. A defence lawyer; a midwife; an ambassador...  Sort of.