A new genre has been developing over the past few years, one that in tribute to the post-war change in British theater I’ve been calling “angry young women plays.”
These new works more or less follow a certain formula: a group of women get together to engage in an activity as in Clare Barron’s 2018 Pulitzer finalist Dance Nation, then they start noting how society has misunderstood or mistreated them as in Liliana Padilla’s How To Defend Yourself which ran at New York Theatre Workshop a couple of years ago and finally they perform some kind of ritual to exorcise their frustrations and rally their abilities to deal with them as they do in Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord.
Intentionally tapping into both comedy and tragedy, these plays give lots of young actresses a chance to show off the full range of what they can do. And they give those of us in the audience fair warning that young women are tired of taking shit and ready to do something about it. Or at least that’s how I felt after recently seeing two shows that hewed to the angry young women formula—one doing it smartly, the other doing it messily.
The smart one is John Proctor is the Villain, playwright Kimberly Belflower’s sharp response to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and it has been nominated as best play of the season by the Tony, Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards.
Miller used the Salem Witch Trials that began in 1692 to comment on the McCarthyism of the 1950s. His protagonist John Proctor has an affair with his teenage servant girl but Miller casts him as the play's noble hero for refusing to name his neighbors or himself as being—as the surrounding hysteria charges—allies of Satan.
Belflower focuses her play on a group of high school students in a small Georgia town as they read Miller’s play, debate all of John Proctor’s behavior and try to figure out what to do with the men in their own lives—boyfriends, fathers, teachers—during the height of the #MeToo revelations.
And so Belflower has crafted both a literary critique of one of the most popular classics in the midcentury canon and a social commentary on the ways in which today's young women are dealing with toxic masculinity.
She’s aided by a terrific cast of young actresses. Sadie Sink, one of the stars in the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” has picked up a Tony nomination (click here to read more about her) but under the surehanded direction of Danya Taymor, they’re all giving kickass performances. Their characters’ moment of catharsis, set to one of the best playlists of the season, left me with a big grin on my face.
Playwright Caitlin Saylor Stephens has assembled the expected crew of twentysomething models—an eager newbie, a drug-addled prima donna, a jaded old-timer, a wisecracking outsider—but she doesn’t know what to do with them. And so they just stand around griping for most of the play’s 100-minute. running time.
Some of what they say about what they've experienced in the business is truly disturbing, justifying any anger they might have. But the models are more often treated as superficial twits and too much of what they say is just blather.
The play’s most potentially interesting character is the female photographer who is finally getting the chance to shoot a cover for the magazine. Although that could be because she’s played by the always watch-worthy Elizabeth Marvel (if you get to the theater early you’ll be treated to a silent pre-show of Marvel moving the set’s furniture around while fully in character).
But even Marvel has a tough time with the storyline about how the photographer’s failing love affair is inhibiting her work. And there’s more than a hint that she may have gotten the job because she was sleeping with someone influential. I mean what the hell kind of feminism is that supposed to be representing?
And even worse is director Morgan Green’s decision to let the climactic scene go on and on and on and on for almost four minutes, sending the audience out of the theater feeling exhausted instead of exhilarated.
