“A witty but disjointed look at female friendship.”
If I was on Sex and the City I would be Charlotte. Specifically pre-9/11 when she was cross-dressing for hookups and posing nude for artists, before they turned her from a romantic to a prude. I find myself meditating on this following Are You There, Nancy Reagan?. A play from the collective Poisoned Well Productions, made up of East 15 graduates and North American theatrical creatives based in London. Written by Emma Freund and directed by Catherine Meiss, the play is a comical analysis of womanhood and female friendship in the 21st century. Narrated by Audrey Parry, we focus on a group of four friends who have gathered together for an annual slumber party.
The central quartet is composed of that exact blend of distinctive, and perhaps relatable, characters. You’ve got the non-confrontational one, the spiritual one, the businesswoman, and the straight-talker. The group are totally believable as a gang of long-term pals, flopped onto each other like blankets and taking the piss out of one another. But there is a sense that this group has grown apart, that the glue is beginning to wear off. These are four women with very little in common. This all comes to a head when they really grill each other over what attitudes and personality flaws disgust them most within the group. Oftentimes, though there are a lot of laughs in the text, the comments they snipe at each other aren’t funny, they’re quite uncomfortable to hear. This is a fractured sorority.
The clash between these ladies serves Freund’s dissection of pop culture’s obsession with female friendship nicely. We are ordered by Parry to pick which one we relate to most. Which of these girls is the Samantha? Are they giving Girls or Derry Girls? Who jokes like Phoebe? Who dresses like Rachel? Who stresses like Monica? We may try, out of habit, to assign a role to each of the women, and they do largely fit into their niche. What’s different here is the often-referred-to presence of feminist critique. The ladies, painfully aware of the flaws of each other, live in an age of heightened media consumption and Reductress articles. They watch the bachelor and read Audre Lorde. They contain multitudes. In weaker hands this dichotomy could weigh down the whole piece, but Freund always manages to keep us laughing while looking at some very pertinent philosophical elements. She strikes the balance.
I must note here that I’m about to divulge a spoiler to the plot, but I think it’s an important one to divulge since I found it to be a major hindrance to the play. Parry, as it turns out, is not just a narrator to the underlying tensions at play in the slumber party, they are also the ghost of the friend whose birthday the slumber party commemorates. We learn through flashback that they were suicidal, and that in the present their friends still grapple with this loss. While touching at points — there is a beautifully poetic, eloquently delivered monologue from Parry after the shoe drops — altogether, it feels like a major curveball, a rather clunky one at that. Aside from the troublesomeness that comes with the Dead (by suicide) All Along trope, it only serves to distract from the momentum that the ensemble had built up to that point. A left-field turn doesn’t always bring the profundity you want.