By the time the two sisters start talking about the proverbial state of England, they realize that they stand at opposite ends of the social ladder. When Marlene comes to visit, Joyce tries to get her to see that Angie's future could be as bleak as the women Marlene now looks down at in their hometown. Meanwhile, Angie is hurtling toward young adulthood while remaining emotionally immature, her best friend the 12-year-old Kit (Rosa Acheson). Marlene works alongside Win (Devika Bhise) and Nell (Eva Gurfein), two other ambitious, power-suited women who understand the path to success: confidence, coldness, and a personal life unburdened by significant others or offspring. The two-act production follows Marlene's rising career at the Top Girls employment agency, where she's recently been promoted over a male co-worker whose wife (Smith again) comes to ask Marlene if she might decline the promotion. Under the direction of Theatre Arts and Studies program director John Astin, Top Girls' cast of seven actresses adroitly handles this heated indictment of 1980s Thatcherism. The answer is all of the above, and kudos to this production for making the political barbs in Churchill's complicated riot of a play resonate today. Did Angie overhear the heated argument Marlene, the London professional, had with her sister Joyce (Sarenka Smith), Angie's adoptive mother and a housecleaner in the small town where the sisters grew up? Did Angie figure out who her mother really is and why she ended up with Joyce? Or is Churchill referring to the economic rift that exists between these two sisters based entirely on their employment status? Is it a comment on the personal sacrifices and choices women have to make in order to achieve success as conventionally defined by the masculine business world, and how the costs of those choices ripple out to impact everybody in a woman's immediate circle? Just what Angie, or Churchill, may find frightening is devastatingly left open to interpretation. It's uttered by the 16-year-old Angie (Beth Flaherty), who, late at night, has wandered down into the working-class kitchen of her single-mother's home to find her aunt Marlene (Victoria Bata) having a budding alcoholic's one more drink before going to bed. The final word in Caryl Churchill's whip-smart 1982 play Top Girls is "frightening," and in the recent production staged by undergraduates in the Johns Hopkins Theatre Arts and Studies program, it lands with the necessary complicated potency. Image caption: Eva Gurfein (left) as Nell and Devika Bhise as Win in the in the Johns Hopkins Theatre Arts and Studies program's performance of "Top Girls."
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