STAGE REVIEW : Even a Flawed ‘Top Girls’ Able to Find Some Success

IRVINE — Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” is what industry sages like to call “a great read.” Fascinating and problematic, it’s a polemical and dense piece that investigates the price of making it in a man’s world through a double lens of bacchanalian fantasy and data-cold dissection.

The UC Irvine drama department is to be congratulated for essaying it, not only because of its topicality, but also because, like many projects that look fabulous on paper, “Top Girls” is a devilishly difficult play to bring off. And despite the fact that director Martha McFarland’s production barely excavates below page level, Churchill’s disturbing damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t examination of women’s lot in life is certain to spark lively discussion.

The first scene is a fantastical cantata of life stories offered in celebration of the promotion of a “high-flying” careerist named Marlene to managing director of the Top Girls Employment Agency. The congregants include a Scottish Victorian adventuress, a 13th-Century Japanese courtesan turned Buddist nun, a medieval warrioress who has clomped out of a Brueghel painting, Pope Joan, Patient Griselda of Chaucerian fame, and Marlene herself, the modern edition of top-girl success.

The rest of the play is a realistic investigation into Marlene’s life: her associates, her family and her secrets. The actresses who appeared in the first scene--as the top girls of their time--reappear as other women in Marlene’s life, carrying with them emotional and idiosyncratic resonances of the fantasy characters they portrayed in the first scene. Reincarnated into Marlene’s cramped contemporary tragedy, those historical characters broaden the scope of the play across millennia and continents to embrace the struggles of soul-starved women throughout time.

In UCI’s production, nothing much resonates through Churchill’s deliberate double casting, and the symbolic scope of Marlene’s struggle goes unrealized, in spite of some strong performances. Christine McGraw gives us a commanding Marlene whose psyche is like a dam cracking before a flood of unfulfillment, loneliness and intolerable regret. Hope Chernov, in Scene 1, is the only real life of that party as Pope Joan. She reappears in a poignantly shaded portrayal of a more-than-capable office manager undone by sexism and ageism. And Stephanie Burden is absolutely delightful as both Kit, an inquisitive, graceless preteen, and Shona, an outrageously spacey applicant at the employment agency.

In the pivotal role of Angie, Christina Tullock gives a one-dimensional performance that seesaws between a sour-faced snarl and half-witted grin. Ann Shipley, who plays three roles, shows promise, but more than the others is sabotaged by McFarland’s surface-scratching direction. The final confrontation between Shipley as Joyce, Marlene’s bitter sister, and McGraw degenerates into shrill bickering, unhinged as it is from the deeper notes of love, yearning and a disappointment far more profound than the social arguments with which the sisters do battle.

The play is being presented in the lobby of the Irvine Barclay Theatre, where the scenes staged on the floor are out of sight lines for much of the audience and the chilly night air seeps through the two-story windows. But go anyway. Bundle up and listen carefully: “Top Girls” is, in any event, a play to be reckoned with.

‘Top Girls’

A UC Irvine theater department production of the Caryl Churchill play. Directed by Martha McFarland. With Christine McGraw, Stephanie Burden, Ann Shipley, Laura Mulrenan, Christina Tullock, Hope Chernov and Demetra Tseckares. Scenic design: R. Grant Sullivan. Costume design: Kimberley Barnhardt. Lighting design: Guy Conger. Performances tonight and Sunday at 8 p.m.at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Admission: Free. (714) 854-4646.