Event

Top Girls

"I have what you have not. I am what you are not. I have taken what you have failed to take and I have seized what you could never get. Therefore you suffer and I am happy, you are despised and I am praised, you die and I live; you are nothing and I am something, and I am all the more something because you are nothing. And thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me."
- Thomas Merton, on the individual

From the bold, theatrical vision of renowned playright Caryl Churchill comes this modern classic still daring in construction and relevant some thirty years after first opening at London's Royal Court Theatre.

Katrina Spenceman (Marlene) leads this able cast in Churchill's daring and difficult work, joined by Dakota Benedetto, Julia Tadlock, Keely Eastley, Bryn Austin, Kenzie Klem, Bridget McBride, Maeve Campman, and Louise Krieger.

It is the dawn of Thatcher's England and Marlene has just crawled above the glass ceiling. She has been promoted to managing director of a London employment agency and is celebrating. Her party - an extraordinary dinner attended by women of legend or history who drink and eat much while asserting their stories of success and sacrifice. Through the doubling of roles, these women are next seen as co-workers, clients, and relatives. We enter both the unforgiving world of affluence Marlene ascends into and the equally unforgiving one of poverty she escaped from.

"Very funny and provocative.... A mind lifting experience." - The New York Post

"Terrifyingly topical in its portrait of an individualistic society in which the few thrive at the expense of the many" -Michael Billington, The Guardian

"Ms. Churchill is merciless in pointing out that everything in this life is scary, including the landscape of roads taken and not taken that every woman faces, no matter what century she's from." Ben Brantley, The New York Times