It Happened Last Night: The Mystery of Playwright Caryl Churchill

The British playwright Caryl Churchill is a mystery. You can’t always be sure what is happening. If you saw her “Mad Forest,” Off Broadway a few years ago, you were left with images of people making hats in the dark while the world rotted. If you saw “A number,” you couldn’t figure out if it was about clones or father-son relationships.

At the opening last night of the revival of her 1982 all-women play at the Biltmore Theater, it became clear that “Top Girls” is a kind of masterpiece, but as nonlinear and erratic and surprising as the conversations of women. Because the plot is as free-ranging as a daydream, its spine hidden until the end, there is no way to second guess the action — which frees the experience from that Broadway game of picking up all the signals. It’s best settled into — not analyzed — but that works only with a great director. I’d read the play; on paper it refused to give up its treasures, but the bravado and fire with which James Macdonald directs the American cast makes it seem self evident. After a few rocky diphthongs in the accents, and a strangely Scottish set of gutturals from Marisa Tomei, they all eventually got it right.

None more so than Martha Plimpton as both the ninth-century Pope Joan and a 15-year-old girl from the north of England. She is astonishing. What’s Pope Joan doing in there? In the first act, Marlene is celebrating being named managing director of a London employment agency by hosting a dinner at a restaurant. Her guests are: Pope Joan; the 19th-century explorer Isabella Bird (Marisa Tomei); Lady Nijo (Jennifer Ikeda), a 13th-century Japanese concubine who became a wandering monk; “Patient Griselda” (Mary Catherine Garrison), a Chaucer character who obeyed her husband as he confiscated her children; and Dull Gret (Ana Reeder), known only from a Breughel painting in which she marches into hell wearing armor.

The dinner dialogue, at first unintelligible because of Tomei’s gruff Scots and Ikeda’s high-pitched Japanese accents, is wildly overlapping and erratic, and then familiar—“Dull Gret has been to hell!” exclaims Marlene. And she means it. “Have we all got dead lovers?” “Nothing good will ever happen again — have you ever felt like that?” “I sewed up a length of grey flannel from Jaeger’s,” and from Pope Joan, on being pope: “The food is very good.” But she also says, talking about her years disguised as a male student: “They noticed I was a very clever boy.” (Pope Joan then explains how she became pregnant and gave birth during a procession, after which she was stoned to death.) By the end of the sparkling act, we know what each woman has given up, but not why — only how she justifies it.

The second act turns the loud explorer (Tomei) into Joyce, Marlene’s sister, struggling mother of Angie, the 15-year-old, and takes us on to Marlene’s employment agency — you can feel the sad hum of Oxford Street outside the set.

Elizabeth Marvel, as Marlene, visits all her worlds with increasing heart. Mary Beth Hurt is in parts too small for her gifts, but as strong as bell. Martha Plimpton goes from the stiff neck and thick robes of the impostor pope spouting Latin, to the sinuous, almost liquid presence of a troubled inarticulate teenager, and her double performance proves that you can be anything you want to be — on stage, if not in life. Go see it for the amazing Plimpton and the cast, the direction and the music by Matthew Herbert, a young Brit whose work helps the production transcend time and space.