Top Girls

The first act of the play is a strange and surreal restaurant meal that echoes a hackneyed interview question: If you could invite any five people from history, fictional or real, to a dinner party, whom would you invite? It also resonates with Judy Chicago’s highly significant 1974-1975 art installation “The Dinner Party,” which set the table with places for 39 important women from history. Notably, none of Marlene’s dining companions made Chicago’s guest list. Why did Caryl Churchill choose these five obscure women? Perhaps because these women are examples of the way the patriarchy has crushed and killed women all over the world and throughout human history. Second-wave feminism was about recognizing that “the personal is political.” Women’s pain and trauma is not caused solely by individual men but embedded within the patriarchal structure of society itself. Lady Nijo, Isabella, Patient Griselda, Dull Gret, Marlene, and every woman in the audience are connected through patriarchal oppression, because the patriarchy is enormous. As the women tell one another their stories over dinner, they recognize the patriarchal violence in each other’s cultures. Yet, for the most part, they don’t recognize it in their own.