THE WOMEN by Clare Boothe Luce, directed by Alisa Palmer (Shaw). At the Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake. Runs in rep to October 9. $30-$105. 1-800-511-7429, shawfest.com. See listing. Rating: NNN
If you’ve seen and enjoyed the classic 1939 MGM film The Women – don’t bother with the awful 2008 remake – you’ll want to check out the original stage play, which has even more bitchy, brittle fun dissecting the male/female divide.
Director Alisa Palmer captures the period feel of the story – with the help of William Schmuck’s dozens of smart costumes – while adding a nod to the politics of our own day, or at least lightly underlining the fact that some things haven’t changed in 80 years.
Mary Haines (Jenny Young) is the play’s innocent, a well-off wife whose husband is cheating on her with the conniving Crystal Allen (Moya O’Connell) Mary’s friend Sylvia Fowler (Deborah Hay) cattily enlightens Mary and helps bring about a divorce and lots of scrapping.
Luce’s ingenious device has the dozens of women in the show talking about the men in their lives, but she never allows a man onstage. It works nicely in this stage version, which pulls fewer punches than the censored film script.
Young’s Mary is warm and believable, never begging for the audience’s pity, while O’Connell is sexy and sharp-edged this is her year for playing femme fatales at Shaw. Hay delivers her gleeful gossip with wide-eyed seeming concern for those she’s trashing, Jenny L. Wright is hysterical as an always-pregnant friend, and Wendy Thatcher gets lots of laughs as the love-seeking Countess de Lage.
Palmer nicely highlights the social gap between the well-to-do and the working class in a strong scene where Mary’s two servants (Patty Jamieson and Melanie Phillipson) discuss their comfortable employer’s problems with men and in the process subtly acknowledge that their own woes will never be so glamorous.
