Displaying items by tag: Caryl Churchill

The Story Theatre’s world‑premiere staging of Paul Michael Thomson’s Pot Girls bursts to life in a vivid, full‑throttle production at Raven Theatre. Pot Girls is a sharp, funny, and thought‑provoking new play that fuses feminist history, artistic accountability, and a rainbow haze of 1980s, weed‑soaked poetry and art.

Inspired as a thematic counterpart to Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Pot Girls - directed by Ayanna Bria Bakari - leans into humor, theatricality, and a cloud of intoxication to explore how women create, collaborate, and collide both onstage and off. And in a bit of theatrical serendipity, both productions are currently running simultaneously at Raven Theatre. In fact, Raven Theatre and The Story Theatre are even offering special marathon days, giving audiences the chance to catch a matinee of Lucky Stiff’s directed Top Girls, stick around for some conversation with the creative team, then return in the evening for Pot Girls - all at a discounted rate (click here for details).

The story follows Caryl herself, a playwright on the cusp of her first major, Olivier‑eligible production - a show designed to spotlight women in the workplace. The year is 1982 and as she toasts the achievement with friends, her colorful London flat transforms into an impromptu hub where a lively, time‑spanning cohort of feminist writers drop in to drink, smoke, debate, and probe the ideas she’s celebrating.

The haze of a jubilant night eventually clears, and what remains is a sharper truth: this play lays bare the exhausting contortions women are expected to perform just to gain a foothold as authors and playwrights. It highlights not only the uphill battle of competing in a landscape where men still discriminate against women in their productions regarding creative authority, but also the added burden of being scrutinized for perfect political correctness the moment a woman-led production finally reaches the stage.

The many ways that women as authors have been discriminated against and unfairly censored or even hunted over the centuries is thoroughly laid out in a fantastic cast of intelligent expressive women.

The period feels fully realized, aided by Katelyn Montgomery’s evocative scenic work and Racquel Postilgione’s sharp costume design.

As the play unfolds, Caryl is pulled through a tangle of personal and professional upheaval - romantic tension with her partner Edith, pointed accusations about her racial blind spots, and the mounting pressure to tell women’s stories with integrity. Around her, the ensemble slips effortlessly between roles, embodying historical figures, colleagues, and critics who collectively push her toward an uncomfortable, necessary self‑examination.

In Pot Girls, Brenna DiStasio centers the production as Caryl, offering a steady emotional clarity that grounds the play’s wilder turns and quietly establishes her as its moral anchor. Ireon Roach, as Edith, wields her well-rolled blunt with sharp wit and charismatic intelligence, building a lively, charged dynamic with DiStasio that keeps the energy flowing like a river.

Peter Ferneding lends understated but essential texture as he shifts through historical and contemporary figures, his easy timing playing neatly against Tamsen Glaser’s agile, precise turns as multiple feminist icons, which bring warmth, wit, and tonal delicacy.

Vibrant, expressive energy radiates through each of Emily Marso’s roles, elevating every moment and sparking electric interplay with Glaser and Maya Bridgewater. Glaser and Bridgewater, in turn, deliver a fierce yet deep human presence across their characters, adding tension and charge to the ensemble’s debates. One of Bridgewater’s characters delivers a beautifully crafted, cathartic reflection on a young girl’s kidnapping and rape - written with such grace and restraint that it resonates powerfully with the conversations society is having today about trafficking and vulnerability.

Rounding out the cast, Laney Rodriguez displays a great sense of humor and threads emotional nuance through each character she inhabits, serving as a subtle connective force while carving out memorable moments opposite DiStasio and Roach. As a unit, the ensemble stays quick, engaged, and combustible, amplifying the play’s ideas with palpable charge.

Ultimately, Pot Girls crackles with ensemble energy and sharp ideas, offering an engaging, thought‑rich night of theatre for anyone drawn to fresh feminist work.

Highly recommended.

Pot Girls has been extended through March 8^th. For tickets and/or more show information, click here.

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com. 

When Raven Theatre’s artistic staff decided to include Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls in their current season, they could not have predicted that the opening would coincide with major eruptions in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Now, with the former Prince Andrew in jail and the President of the United States bloviating his innocence, this 1982 British play stings harder than ever.

Lucky Stiff’s smooth handling of a fine cast for Raven’s mainstage makes it clear why the play deserves its status as a feminist classic. From an informal angle, the reaction of a mostly youthful audience watching mostly youthful actors confirms that the stage is still the right place to comment mercilessly on societal injustice.

Nonlinear, nontraditional Top Girls premiered in the first years of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership – an imaginative treatment of the complexities of gender roles. How do you become a “top girl” in a man’s world without losing your soul? Depending on your politics, Thatcher either ran a country with necessary tough love and cooked dinner for her husband too; or she hacked away at Britian’s safety net while using taxpayer-funded help to maintain her Superwoman household.

In Act I, Marlene, the dynamic central character played by Claire Kaplan, hosts a dinner to celebrate her recent promotion at an employment agency. She gathers five historical women at a posh restaurant, sparely and elegantly designed by Joonhee Park, where they pour out their pain along with copious amounts of wine.

As Waitress (Colin Quinn Rice) serves with dispassionate efficiency, the women – explorer Isabella Bird (Susaan Jamshidi), Flemish folklore’s Dull Gret (Yourtana Sulaiman), Japanese courtesan Lady Nijo (Hannah Kato), 9^th Century’s Pope Joan (Morgan Lavenstein), and Chaucer’s Patient Griselda (Luke Halpern) – recount episodes of shocking male cruelty. Multiple accents and overlapping dialogue make the individual stories a little hard to follow. But each cast member creates such a distinct personality that a strong vibe emerges even if some details are lost.

In Act II, Churchill leaves fantasy behind and enters the very real working-class home of single mom Joyce (Jamshidi) and her 16-year-old daughter Angie (Sulaiman) who literally wants to kill her bitter mother. Spoiler alert, Angie flees to her Aunt Marlene’s office in London without doing the deed. There, female staffers interview other females for job placement. As one frustrated woman laments to Marlene, who now leads the department, “I have had to justify my existence every minute.” Centuries may have passed but talented women still fight for recognition.

When Angie shows up unannounced, she gets pushback instead of a warm welcome from Marlene. The teen desperately wants to acquire her role model’s independence, resources and, above all, confidence that mom-figure Joyce so obviously lacks. Marlene can’t hold back the sharp elbows and judges Angie accordingly, a girl who may not have what it takes to survive.

Act III moves even farther away from the play’s stylized opening with an extended scene that’s straight from the kitchen sink realism of post-World War II drama. Occurring a year prior to Act II, Marlene pays an unexpected visit to Joyce’s humble home and presents Angie with a dress that’s straight out of the traditional girlie playbook.

When it comes to success, “I’m not clever,” Marlene insists, “just pushy.” How Marlene has pushed herself to the top is clear by now. What she has pushed aside in the process tumbles out as the three women open their hearts in ways that leave them vulnerable. It is almost frightening. Four decades after Churchill penned Top Girls, news reports of Jeffrey Epstein’s atrocities only seem to confirm her point that womanhood is neither safe nor easy.

Top Girls runs through March 21^st at Raven Theatre. For tickets and information, go to www.raventheatre.com/stage/topgirls.

Recommended.

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com.

A Number is an elegant, fully enthralling thought piece by one of Britain’s greatest playwrights, Caryl Churchill. Just over an hour long, it is relentlessly intriguing, keeping you on the edge of your seat as you follow the unfolding story - first in bits and pieces, then building to a torrent of revelation, and finally slamming shut, like a book cover at the end of an intense mystery.

Set in the not too distant future, A Number opens with father and son midway through an intense conversation. We can see the son, Bernard, is distraught.

We piece together that Bernard has learned that his birth was the product of a scientific intervention. But this is not the root of his upset. Rather, he has discovered that the research scientist, now deceased, employed experimental methods and went further than he should have.

With a powerful performances by William Brown as the father, Salter, and the skillful Nate Burger in the role of Bernard, this mystery puts the audience through an intellectual puzzle along the lines of Proof or Doubt.

In this case, Bernard learns that he is not alone - that there were other test tube babies cloned in that lab. More painfully, perhaps, we gather that Bernard has a whiff of suspicion his father was complicit with everything, and continues to dissemble.

“They said none of us was the original,” Bernard tells Salter. “If you are not my father, it’s fine. If you did an in vitro or whatever, just tell me.” How many were there?

“A number,” his father replies vaguely, and again we sense he knows more than he is admitting. He moves to distract Bernard from this upset by calculating the dollar value of a lawsuit against the laboratory for this violation of their trust.

In fact, Salter knows much more, but we must not spoil the plot. We can say Churchill artfully traverses the science, emotional and dramatic terrain in a unique way - exploring our tendency to all too easily surrender governance of our souls to the technological wonders surrounding us. It is also a tragedy, and Brown’s Shakespearean chops serve him well as he laments, “I did some bad things, and I deserve to be punished,” but adding a post-modern twist, “And I did some better things, and I deserve recognition for that.” Bernard rails back, “That’s how everyone feels!” And we wallow with them in our uniquely contemporary angst.

This work, written in 2002, is a precursor to the dark intensity we experience in watching Black Mirror on television. The action heightens and takes violent twists that are shocking even if unseen. The scenic design by Courtney O’Neill, with black picture windows looking out on the void, conveys an eerie spectre of foreboding.

Churchill is known for Cloud Nine, Top Girls, and Serious Money, all three of them Obie winning works - but I am sorry to say I did not know more of her. Now I will be unable to forget her. 

Plaudits to the creative team at Writers Theatre, including dramaturg Bobby Kennedy in this masterful production tightly directed by Robin Witt. We can highly recommend it. A Number runs through June 9, 2019 at Writers Theatre in Glencoe.