Power Trip.(Top Girls)(Theater review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Caryl Churchill's groundbreaking Top Girls arrives on Broadway with a top-notch cast, writes Adam Green .

With such time-and gender-bending plays as Cloud Nine and Mad Forest, the brilliant English writer Caryl Churchill has tapped into the Zeitgeist with unmatched ferocity, theatrical invention, and wit. Most recently, in the compact two-hander Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, she served up a blistering indictment of the U.S. and Great Britain's "special relationship," told as a sulfurous gay romance. This month, Churchill's 1982 tour de force, Top Girls, makes its Broadway debut with a cast of, well, top girls, including Elizabeth Marvel, Martha Plimpton, Marisa Tomei, and Mary Catherine Garrison. A dizzyingly imaginative vivisection of the Thatcher era, it raises still-provocative questions about how far women have come in society and whether the game is worth the candle.

Reuniting with Churchill at the helm of Top Girls is James Macdonald, who after nimbly directing Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? at the Public Theater turns from a play whose characters rarely form a complete sentence to one whose characters can't stop talking. "Caryl uses language in such sophisticated ways," he says. "You have to be very precise and find the rhythm and music in it--you're rather like the conductor of a chamber orchestra, aren't you?"

Macdonald has his work cut out for him with the famous first act, in which the play's heroine, Marlene, celebrates her promotion to head of the Top Girls employment agency by throwing a dinner at an Italian restaurant. Among those toasting her and telling their own tales of sacrifice are Lady Nijo, the thirteenth-century Japanese courtesan turned Buddhist nun; Isabella Bird, the nineteenth-century English explorer; and the demon-slaying matron of Bruegel's sixteenth-century painting Dulle Griet. As Marlene, Elizabeth Marvel, who gave an indelible performance as the original desperate housewife ...