Ladies
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Boston Court Pasadena
Through June 30
RECOMMENDED:
Even in the darkest, most unenlightened era, there have been women prepared, often driven, to buck the strictures placed upon their gender. Ladies, Kit Steinkellner’s illuminating world premiere play directed by Jessica Kubzansky at Boston Court Pasadena, imagines what it must be like to be this kind of person, ready to risk pariahdom for the sake of personal freedom. And conversely, it speculates on what it must have felt like in another century to be brimming with talent, even genius, but unable to bring it to fruition for fear of pillory and scorn.
Steinkellner sets her story in 18th century England — though, as she explains in the course of the play, the tale she’s spinning doesn’t literally hew to historical fact; instead, it’s an amalgam of dramatic supposition based on what we — or rather she, the playwright — imagine to have been the experience of women artists and intellectuals of that era.
The characters, however, bear the names, talents and social accoutrements of actual people, and the literary circle they belong to in Steinkellner’s narrative was a real institution. This was the Blue Stockings Society of England, which was a loose organization of literary-minded women who participated in salons, along with some men, where literature (never politics!) was discussed. The biggest patroness, perhaps because she had the most means and the best connections, was a woman named Elizabeth Montagu, who wielded considerable power and influence. One of her friends, Elizabeth Carter, was a poet, and Montagu acted as her supporter and fan.
In Ladies, by contrast, Elizabeth Montagu (Meghan Andrews) is neither broadly influential nor a staple of upper-class British society; she’s a brave, idealistic but insecure woman who must work hard to convince other women to attend her salon. Some of these other women have been paying a price for their literary celebrity, satirized in cartoons in the local rag and whispered about in privileged social settings. Among them is Carter (Carie Kawa), fashioned by the playwright as not only Montagu’s closest friend but her dialectical opponent when it comes to determining how much one should be prepared to sacrifice for one’s art: Pretty much everything, is Montagu’s view — but she herself isn’t a novelist or poet or visual artist, much as she would like to be. (She’s just a second-tier fan, like a critic). Elizabeth Carter, on the other hand, has already made a splash with her poetry, and regrets her fame, calling it the ruin of her. The question, to revolt against convention or not, is one they argue throughout the play.
The other two characters from the past (there’s also a third character but we’ll get to that) are novelist Fanny Burney (Jully Lee) and painter Angelica Kauffman (Tracey A. Leigh). Steinkellner’s Burney is a tremulous person much respected by Circle members for her brilliant talent but maligned by her husband (Leigh in male garb) who feels threatened when he sees himself in her work. Besides her spouse, Burney, in the public eye, suffers greatly from the adverse opinion of others. In Steinkellner’s telling, Kauffman is a strong confident woman, but frustrated as an artist because she’s confined to landscapes and self-portraits; painting other people is reserved for male artists, verboten for her.
The fifth character — a waggish incarnation of the playwright who comments on the lives of these 18th century British ladies from the perspective of a contemporary American woman — bears the playwright’s name and is introduced in the script as an amateur historian. Portrayed variously by each of the four actors, who don large orange spectacles for their transformation, she appears at junctures as an ironical spectator, wryly and self-disparagingly discoursing about her decade-long experience researching and writing this play, and highlighting for us some of the poignant parallels between what the characters endure as “half-persons” in their culture, and what women today continue to struggle with.
Some of the strongest moments in this impressionistic narrative are evoked less with words than with the silence between them: one in which Burney removes her clothes to pose nude before Kauffman, and the concluding encounter between these two characters where they contemplate crossing a line — and do not. The other brilliant sequence — two actually — is a conjuring of what these women’s sex lives with their husbands might have been, with Kawa and Leigh depicting the men, who are either clueless and uncaring, or caring — but clueless nonetheless.
It’s fitting that such a sterling play about women should be assembled by an all-woman production team that includes innovative costumes, white with some black (Ann Closs-Farley) and, per the script, a spare but evocative set of the period (Sara Ryung Clement) and subtle lighting (Jaymi Lee Smith).
I’ve said nothing about the performances so far, but let it suffice that they are uniformly excellent, and Kubzansky’s direction, as per usual, accomplished.
Boston Court Pasadea, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m., through Jun. 30. BostonCourtPasadena.org or (626) 683-6801. Running time: approximately one hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.
