Sunday Kzoo Gazette Article about Mom's play

Civic provides satire, nostalgia and elegance in 'The Women'
Theater review
“The Women” — Presented by the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre. Director: Preston Misner. Continues at 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday, April 20-21, April 27-28; 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 19; 2 p.m. April 22, Civic Auditorium, 329 S. Park St. 343-1313 or www.kazoocivic.com.
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By Mark Wedel
Special to the Gazette

The Kalamazoo Civic Theatre’s staging of the 1936 Clare Booth Luce satire “The Women” is one giant confection of femininity.

With perfect period costumes, an elegant set of art deco design with a background of translucent fabrics, sophisticated swing and ballads of the ’30s, and a cast of 40 women, Friday night saw the theatrical equivalent of a sweet towering cake — some of it, due to authentic period undergarments, unabashed cheesecake.

Credit goes to the chefs, director Preston Misner, scenic designer David Kyhn, costume/hair/makeup designer Barbara B. Moelaart and lighting/sound designer George Eric Perry.

It looked sweet, but under the frosting were some spicy, crusty and sharp flavors and textures.

Luce’s play exposes the claws — in the color of “Jungle Red,” the nail polish favored by the main characters — of upper-class New York society women. They spend their idle lives staying in fashion, improving their looks and worrying about the only means they have to keep their status, their husbands.

Their only pleasure comes from what the only unmarried independent intellectual of the group, Nancy (Anne Fackler), calls “orgasm by gossip.”

Mary (Renee Smith) is the happiest in her group of friends. Her life seems normal, her fashions tasteful, her behavior gracious. So when her catty friends find that her husband has been cheating on her, with a common shop girl, they explode in glee.

Of course Mary finds out about the affair, and at the same time she finds that everybody knows. This leads to a series of confrontations, catfights, divorce vacations to Reno and two more years of fighting that lasts more than two hours on stage.

The dialogue is dense with lines that range from comic passive-aggressive to vicious. That and its populous cast, many with small walk-on roles giving hilarious lines meant as background chatter, makes “The Women” seem like a Robert Altman film.

For all that clever and sometimes subtle dialogue to work, perfect delivery is essential. That wasn’t always the case Friday night, but about half of the 40 actresses were making their Civic debut, and many of those were on stage for their first time anywhere.

Among the main characters were several standout performances. Michele Sobota as Sylvia was vile and vicious as the queen of the gossips. She carried herself in insane fashions (What the heck was that on her head, an overturned bowl on top of an orange turban?) with a dash of imperious Joan Crawford attitude.

Bethany Banner as the always pregnant and child-hating Edith, and Mary Jassick as the always remarrying Countess De Lage, provided many of the moments that got massive laughs from the audience. Kelly Campbell was a sharp gold-digging minx as the woman who steals Mary’s husband.

Gold-digging minx? Can we use such terms in our era? “The Women,” for its time, was a sharp satire of women who were too dependent on men, with an extra Depression-era dig at the high-class folks, but it is very much a product of the 1930s.

However, the Civic uses this to add to its production’s nostalgic charm and humor, including having all the characters smoke (unlit prop cigarettes, of course, or else the theater would’ve been as smoky as the Green Top on a Friday night) and casting maids straight out of a ’30s film, smiling and mincing about in formation as they clear the stage between scenes.