An open letter to those who left Top Girls after the first act or those unable to make it because they were too busy.

Dear Sirs and Madams:

I completely understand. Friday and Saturday nights are busy ones. After all, it was getting late and CSI was on and your hair needed washing. It’s cool. Since I had the misfortune of having to stay the whole time (I had to write this silly review, after all), let me catch you up on what you missed.

First, I agree with you that the play itself is a total mess. What happened to the days of spoon-fed, well-made, numbing narrative? Those were the good old days. The opening act in which a collection of historical female figures, all of whom fought against some extraordinary social gender bias, are used to articulate the position of the modern 1980s woman, left me in a daze. And the horrid style of allowing one person to talk over another, especially when one person’s comment articulated the dialogue of another just as it was happening, made me wistful for Neil Simon and Titanic: The Musical. Why can’t the characters simply wait until after the other is done speaking before they begin to talk, just like we all do in real life? So rude.

As for the acting, let me tell you, it was painfully good. Some of the women’s performances were so exciting, I got hot flashes. Junior Marielle Solan’s work as both Dull Gret, a rough country wife who once battled hell, and Angie, a shy and simple young woman, was so well done that I have reason to believe she did not actually play both roles herself; one of the roles must have been taken up by an unbilled actor. It would be impossible for both performances, one requiring broad swaths of gesture and crude, vaudevillian humor and the other requiring such subtle delicacy, to come from one actor in such a short span of time. Solan was so enjoyable, it is no wonder she’s never been allowed onto the Hall stage before.

The same can be said about most of the cast. Junior Sarah-Violet Bliss’s timing was borderline criminal. Sophomore Mary Notari, as the Catholic church’s only female pope, showed us why underclassmen should be relegated to Wilder Main or Noah Basement, lest they overshadow upperclassmen with their talent. Of course, there were Hall vets like Olivia Briggs and Claire McNulty, both of whom should have been ashamed of themselves for performing so well in such a production.

The set design was fittingly dull. As we have all learned from previous Hall productions, the large size of the stage demands that it be filled entirely with set pieces. That director Claudia Zelevansky allowed for smaller, functional and well-suited pieces on the stage is a blot on her resume as a director. Her attention to detail, such as the inclusion of Talking Heads as transitional music and Briggs sipping from a can of Tab, both infused the production with the feel of the 1980s and showed that she devoted serious attention to all aspects production. Is there anything less rewarding for an audience member than a skilled director that invests herself fully in a production? I think not.

In short, you didn’t miss much. Top Girls did nothing more than serve as a coming-out party for four fine actors, redefine set design in Hall and deliver one of the best plays written in the past 30 years to an Oberlin stage. See? Booooring. Who wants some Ovaltine?

XOXO,

Pete

P.S. To the young woman that sat behind me and kept her bare feet on the back of my seat the whole time, occasionally touching me with them — that wasn’t totally gross and didn’t display any sort of lack of theater etiquette. Awesome.