‘Women’ just want to have fun

It takes a real leap of theatrical imagination to envision “The Women,” Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 satire about the lives of women in Manhattan high society, the way co-directors Briyana Davis ’13 and Julia Blount ’12 have in their Black Arts Company Drama production. Unfortunately, their thought-provoking concept isn’t always matched by the uneven acting.

The 21-person, all-female cast of “The Women” is probably the youngest and most racially diverse I have seen in a Princeton student production. Sixteen freshmen grace the Intime stage in this show, accounting for much of the rawness of the performance but illustrating a real commitment on the part of BAC to cultivate young talent. By casting many African-American actresses in “The Women,” written for an all-white cast, BAC has created an ingenious and fresh update to a drama steeped in the particulars of its period.

“The Women” concerns a group of middle-aged friends — mostly the wives of prominent Wall Street stockbrokers and other titans of New York business — and their daily interactions with themselves and their servants. They play bridge, they shop, they go for lavish manicures, and — first and foremost — they gossip ruthlessly about one another. Things heat up when Sylvia (Claire Greene ’13) discovers that Steven Haines, husband of her friend Mary (Kit Thayer ’11), has been having an affair with a clerk at Sachs (Liz Cook ’13). The jarring repercussions of this uproot Mary from her quiet New York domestic life to the divorce courts of Reno, and, eventually, a quest to win her husband back.

The strongest performances come in several supporting roles that galvanize the occasionally moribund production. Abi Adenikinju ’13 is hilarious as the Countess de Lage, a drunken Frenchwoman coming off her fourth divorce who appears periodically in the lives of the protagonists. Savannah Hankinson ’13 rises to the challenge of playing a quartet of different parts, filling each with a commanding stage presence. Enyonam Glover ’13 is quite effective as the young daughter of the lead (Mary Haines) traumatized by her parents’ divorce.

Where the acting falls flat, regrettably, is in the main roles. Thayer’s quiet and stiff demeanor is appropriate for the affluent, 1930s Manhattanite she portrays, but she never appears sufficiently distraught by revelations of her husband’s infidelity, the incident on which the play’s central conflict hinges. Too often, her acting comes off as forced and mechanical, and she speaks so quietly that at times I wondered whether her lines would be audible to the last row of spectators. Thayer is also a former copy editor for The Daily Princetonian.

Claire Greene ’13, playing Mary’s gossipy, cutthroat friend Sylvia, suffers from the opposite problem. Even for a satire, she delivers too many of her lines with overenthusiastic emotion, and the confrontation she has with romantic rival Miriam Aarons (Alex Baptiste ’13) near the end of the performance just seems absurd.Compounding these problems is the inherently slow pace of the show. “The Women” is driven by gossip, by long, furtive conversations, by the foibles and digressions of the elite. Action is hard to come by, and without much emotionally compelling acting, this makes for some long moments.

The props and costumes suggest an odd balance between a conventional and modernized staging of the play that isn’t fully effective. In one scene, for instance, an authentic-looking record player serenades Sylvia as she exercises, but in others the characters take calls on a plainly anachronistic white push button phone.

In their program notes, Davis and Blount write, “This show is not about race — it’s about women. You may notice our color-blind casting (black parents with white children, and vice versa). We consciously made this choice. One of the great things about “The Women” is that we have formed a great community of girls from every walk of life. This show proves that friendships can cross the racial lines that often divide our campus.” I admire this vision and commend BAC for bringing powerful, unconventional work to the Princeton theater scene. It’s too bad that the final product isn’t a bit more polished.