Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls is a play about power and female identity. For Churchill’s characters, these two forces are almost always at odds with each other.
The play is divided between a surreal, dreamlike dinner party attended by famous historical women and the more down-to-earth tale of a career woman in Thatcher-era England. Churchill unites the two settings with a common theme: a woman who wants power has to sacrifice some part of herself to get it, a complex Catch-22 that is entirely unique to women. The collisions between Churchill’s characters suggest that to become a “top girl” in any era, a woman has to betray both herself and her fellow women to some extent.

Ok, ok. Slow down. Those progressive nostrils of yours smell something fishy in that paragraph, right? “Hang on just a minute, Derm!” you say, gesticulating wildly and spilling your Fresca. “Are you implying that there’s a distinct set of characteristics inherent to women, and that to deviate from these characteristics constitutes a ‘betrayal‘?! And even if such a narrow definition of womanhood exists, who gets to do the defining?” Pat yourself on the back, Mr. or Ms. Progressive - those are just the kind of juicy questions Churchill wants you to be asking. And trust me: see this play and you will walk out with a thousand questions bouncing around in your brain. Also: see this play by yourself on a Wednesday afternoon and you will be surrounded by a lot of very old people. But I digress.

Churchill covers a lot of ground in this work, but she is at her most incisive when examining the phenomenon of childbirth. How might this relate to power, you ask? Surely the ability to create life is the most awesome power in the human arsenal, a force both physical and spiritual that is almost overwhelming in its mysterious beauty . And yet male-dominated society has such an obtuse love-hate relationship with reproduction that the inherent beauty of creation quickly gets lost in the confusion. Churchill examines the attitudes toward motherhood and childbirth throughout history, but lets look at England in the 1980s for the time being. Marlene, Churchill’s main character and every inch the upwardly mobile career woman of the 1980s, has repudiated motherhood entirely (I’ll not tell you how exactly, just trust me). By shunning the responsibilities and limitations of motherhood, she has also sacrificed its power to some degree, or at the very least she has exchanged the power of reproduction for the power of commerce. She chooses to pursue conventional, male-pattern success to the complete denial of her reproductive instincts; she turns her back definitively on that most feminine part of herself. “And why shouldn’t she?”, you might ask. It’s a free world, and with Maggie at the helm, England seems poised and ready to accept an influx of smart, driven career women with dollar signs in their eyes and birth control pills in their purses.

Fair enough. And Marlene does in fact achieve success; to Churchill as to any other reasonable human being, there is no intelligence or ability gap between men and women, and so Marlene rises quickly in the business world. And yet there is a gap of some kind between Marlene and her male colleagues, a gaping chasm in fact. A man succeeds in business and he is simply a successful man, no complications about it. Marlene has also succeeded, but it his clear that some part of her has been lost, neutered, and silenced. She has had to remove something from her identity to make room for success, and that something was a part of what makes her a woman. In short, she is not happy or whole, and while perhaps many successful men are not happy either, Churchill is examining a uniquely female strain of discontent. Marlene has power, money, the envy of her peers…she has everything except, it seems, a clear idea of who she is or who she should be. Are the external forces of male-dominated society solely to blame for this identity crisis, or could Churchill be asking us if women have some kind of responsibility to the power of childbirth? By choosing to turn away from motherhood, do they turn too far away from themselves? Awkward as the question may seem, methinks she is asking just that. And, like any artist worth her salt, she doesn’t really provide an answer.

As if these questions weren’t enough, Churchill takes us even deeper. It is no accident that the bulk of the play is set against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s reign of casual cruelty and the deadly politics of the Cold War. In one scene, two young girls discuss the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, and suddenly it seems reasonable to wonder: should anyone want to bring a child in to this fragile and turbulent world? If the world could be reduced to ash at any moment by the actions of a handful of narcissistic fools (mostly male), what does the act of giving birth mean? Why should a woman acknowledge or act on her instinct for perpetuation? Churchill casts denial of motherhood as a political act, as a choice not to join the military-industrial rat race. By not having children, a woman could conceivably be saying “No, I will not create more bodies for the pyre”. This resistance to motherhood also falls in line with Maggie Thatcher’s “every man for himself” style of no-compassion conservatism. (Thatcher is a perfect symbol for Churchill’s examinations of the dichotomies within the female identity). And yet, by repudiating childbirth in order to gain a foothold in the business world, aren’t Marlene and women like her buying into the same male-dominated world that gave rise something like the Cold War? What’s a girl to do?

As trite and tongue-in-cheek as that sounds, that’s really what this play comes down to: what is a girl as something distinct from a boy, and how exactly is she supposed to operate inside that identity? To what extent is a woman’s identity hers and to what extent is it forced on her from the outside? There’s so many great scenes to dissect, and too many interesting characters to summarize (especially in the first scene), but these questions are over-arching and inform almost every line of the play. Churchill reminds us that the restrictions and limitations placed on women throughout history have by no means disappeared; they have only been updated to better suit the demands of modern society. What appears to be progress for women may only be a subtle re-arrangement of the rules arrayed against them.

If you’re comfortable accepting theater recommendations from a humble call screener, I strongly suggest you check out this difficult but extremely rewarding play. Churchill’s work is sorely under-produced, especially on Broadway, and the political themes of the play are as timely as can be - Thatcher’s ugliness and the mood of doom it created should be sadly familiar to us all. I do not presume to have this play figured out entirely, but needless to say, there’s a lot of meat here for progressives to chew on. Don’t go and see this play unless you like thinking, because Caryl Churchill will get inside your brain and hold on tight.

Top Girls, produced by the Manhattan Theater Club, is now playing at the Biltmore Theater in a limited engagement that runs until June 22nd. See it now!

http://www.mtc-nyc.org/current-season/top-girls/INDEX.HTM