Theater: The Ladies Who Lunch

The last time Broadway housed a Caryl Churchill play was 20 years ago, when the most unforgettable image in Serious Money, a satire of the 1980s bull market, was bare-chested Alec Baldwin making hay of the author’s rhyming couplets. Still, the hirsute hottie couldn’t keep the critically lambasted, misunderstood play alive, and so Serious Money closed after 15 not-so-serious performances. The British playwright then became, if no commercial theater darling, at least a writer of serious coinage, with productions at the Public Theater (The Skriker, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?), New York Theater Workshop (Far Away, A Number) and virtually any nonprofit where leftist politics and righteous drama easily converge.

Manhattan Theatre Club’s choice to revive Churchill’s Top Girls, which ran at the Public back in 1982, is still a surprise—and maybe that’s why the production is both solid and sluggish. After all, MTC is known for hewing to domestic dramas like barnacles to a boat, whereas Churchill’s work generally—and Act 1 of Top Girls in particular—spurns naturalism like a discarded lover.

This act, key to understanding what follows, occurs in an upscale restaurant resembling any other; and the host, Marlene (Elizabeth Marvel), with her blunt haircut and business suit, indeed resembles any other executive. But her guests look like refugees from Madame Tussaud’s: Isabella Bird (Marisa Tomei), the 19th-century traveler; Dull Gret (Ana Reeder), the central subject in a Pieter Brueghel painting; Lady Nijo (Jennifer Ikeda), a 13th-century Japanese concubine; Patient Griselda (Mary Catherine Harrison), a creation from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales; and the infamous 9th-century figure, Pope Joan (Martha Plimpton). We watch them eat, talk over, under and around each other, and compare notes as women who surmounted obstacles to take their place at this feminist metaphorical table.

In Act 2, a teenage girl, Angie (Plimpton), pouts in a tent with her friend Kit (Garrison), complaining about her ineffectual mother, Joyce (Tomei), over what an awful working-class environment she’s living in. But for an ominous sky (lit by Christopher Akerlind), there’s little to her surroundings to justify her anger; but then, most teenage angst isn’t rational. Next, we discover that Marlene is Joyce’s sister, who leads, in Angie’s estimation, a glamorous life running a London employment agency—so she runs off to London to visit her. In Act 3, which occurs a year earlier, we learn how Marlene came into Angie’s life—a secret explaining all of what we’ve witnessed.

Is Top Girls worth the payoff? I don’t think so: The inexplicability of Act 1 lingers too long into Act 2 and, indeed, into Act 3. Despite James Macdonald’s tidy staging, the play’s arc is so quizzical that when it shifts into naturalism for Acts 2 and 3, it takes too long to reconfigure one’s brain.

But you’ll also be gobsmacked by the acting. Marvel is a fitting surname for this actress, given how grounded Marlene is in Act 1 and beyond. And you’ll hardly recognize Tomei; there are moments in Act 3 that are seismically moving. As the waitress in Act 1 and as Louise, a job candidate, in Act 2, Mary Beth Hurt is whipsaw of concentrated character-building. I adored Ikeda’s Lady Nijo, but as one of Marlene’s business associates (Win, in Act 2) she’s even better—quirky enough to steal her scene. Reeder is fearsome as a painting come to life in Act 1 and acute as another of Marlene’s associates in Act 2.

Plimpton, though, is a keen dream. Her Pope Joan is stentorian, wary, impish, rueful; her Angie has all those same qualities but through the eyes of a teenage girl—a real top girl who breaks your heart.

Through June 22. Biltmore Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200; $46.50-$91.50.