Dear MTC Theatregoer: Our current production at the Biltmore Theatre is Top Girls, Caryl Churchill’s powerful, ground-breaking exploration of women’s roles in the modern world. Set in Margaret Thatcher’s England of the 1980s but moving freely in time and space and between fantasy and realism, Top Girls focuses on Marlene, a career woman who has just been promoted to managing director of Top Girls Employment Agency. We see her first at a celebratory dinner with an assemblage of extraordinary women from history and legend; we then move to Suffolk , Marlene’s home town, where we meet a teenager, Angie, whose quest for an emotional safe haven becomes central to the play. The action then shifts to the employment agency, where Marlene’s dealings with colleagues and clients are interrupted by Angie’s unexpected arrival. The play’s final act, set again in Suffolk , depicts Marlene’s encounter with members of the family she left behind. The characters onstage are entirely female, but men are omnipresent; the offstage fathers, husbands, lovers, bosses, clergymen, and rulers shape and influence the characters’ lives and actions. In exploring the struggles of Marlene and her spiritual sisters to define and achieve success on their own terms, Caryl Churchill raises profound and timely questions about relationships between the sexes, the rootlessness that results from upward mobility, whether a woman today can both love and work, and what it costs her to become a top girl. I am extremely pleased to be producing this major work by one of the world’s leading playwrights and very excited by the production team that will bring it to life on stage. The director is Ms. Churchill’s frequent collaborator, James Macdonald (A Number, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You); the extraordinary cast features Mary Beth Hurt, Mary Catherine Garrison, Jennifer Ikeda, Elizabeth Marvel, Martha Plimpton, Anna Reeder, and Marisa Tomei. I look forward to hearing from you after you have seen it. All best, Daniel Sullivan
|
