REVIEW
The Women
Feb. 7 to 11
Walterdale Theatre
10322 – 83 Ave.
Tickets: $20/adults; $18/seniors; $15/Walterdale members. Call 780-420-1757 or at www.tixonthesquare.ca
There’s a royal catfight percolating in Clare Boothe Luce’s urbane comedy The Women, and it’s pretty down and dirty.
Luce’s 1936 play opened at Walterdale Theatre on Wednesday night, expressing the dual nature of women, how poisonous and compassionate they are to each other.
These are the sophisticated women of New York’s Park Avenue crowd, an environment of feminine venom where claws are unsheathed at every turn.
These are women who live to prowl for husbands. But once they land a rich fish, their envied social class becomes a merry-go-round of manicurists, lunches, dress fittings and club engagements.
The only thing that spices up a bored existence is the spread of toxic gossip. It quickly becomes obvious these ladies long ago stopped acting ladylike.
In updating The Women, director Catherine Wenschlag deconstructs it to reveal the fairer sex as each other’s best friends and worst enemies. Despite its serious theme, it is a highly entertaining cat show flowing with a constant stream of humour.
The play centres around Mary Haines, a smart, sensible socialite who leads a relatively happy existence until she discovers her husband is having an affair with a predatory, social climber. Mary responds by divorcing the man she loves.
Although the dialogue feels dated, Wenschlag delivers oxygen to the themes by emphasizing three-dimensional character development. This comes across in comedic bursts as the upper crust and the servant class swap beliefs on a woman’s place in a man’s world.
A big factor leading to the success of this production is an incredibly tight cast of 13 actresses who always appear on the same wavelength.
Roseanna Sargent’s plummy British accent lends both a patrician yet pragmatic and stoic quality to the role of Mary. Sargent also has the intuitive wisdom to underplay her role and comes across as the family backbone.
Of all Mary’s scheming friends, Sylvia is the most vitriolic. And actor Nicole Lemay keeps the play’s engine operating at full throttle delivering the juiciest lines. Her condescending tone, smarmy affectations and rapacious posture lend itself to a woman who cannot feel content without destroying others.
Julie Whelan as Crystal Allen, the self-centred, cheating mistress is knock-out beautiful with a cold, calculating attitude, and Trish Doornum’s much-married Countess DeLage is deliciously over-the-top sampling a revolving door of husbands.
Two actors that do a standout job of smaller roles are St. Albert’s Kate Elliot and Peg Young. Elliott is the manicurist who accidentally tells Mary her husband is cheating. Within a short two-minute scene Elliot goes through a series of emotions from delightfully spreading gossip to the horrible realization of her words and a fumbling apology.
And Young, as the elderly Maggie, one of Mary’s servants, is an artful comedienne who nailed every punch line of old-fashioned wisdom and left the audience clamouring for more.
The Women is a rowdy and very funny spectacle with just enough flash and flair to transport the viewer to another dimension.
