“Who gets thanked?” asks the matriarch at the center of the Julia May Jonas play “Women Among Women,” which made its debut in Bushwick this week, doubling as the debut production at the recently-remade Bushwick Starr, a local theater company that has just moved its playhouse out of “an apartment on the second floor of 207 Starr Street,” as memorably described a decade ago by the New York Times, which had celebrated the address as a fulcrum of then-nascent Bushwick theater culture. It was not Jonas’ first time putting on material with group; a decade younger, fresh out of an MFA program at Columbia, she was putting on “Evelyn” at the old location, considered at the time a meditation on her own time spending a month in “a wayward girls institution,” per a brief write-up in the Brooklyn Rail in 2012.
Her influences back then had ranged “from Balzac’s ‘Cousin Bette’ to getting really into the music of the Dirty Projectors.” (Who among us?) In the decade since, Jonas has moved on to putting on plays at Lincoln Center and writing a novel, Vladimir, that got the two–review treatment from her closely-watching friends at the NYT. Some things stay, however, in her return to the newer, somewhat flashier version of the Bushwick she had left. Now, its located inside a bright, publicly-funded and industrially-designed playhouse on the liminal border between Bushwick and Ridgewood, the creation of Peter Zuspan, an architect perhaps most well-known for designing the Williamsburg club National Sawdust. (“intimate but airy, high-ceilinged.”)
Jonas’ institution for wayward girls transforms, in “Women Among Women,” to an off-stage institution that holds the lost daughter of Cleo’s thankless life, who is gone from stage but nevertheless looms large as a beacon to futures lost while Cleo herself persists at the margins of middle class society. She runs an “psychological wellness center for women,” repeatedly and omnipresently called “the Center.” She insistently sings, at one point, that “the center is a bastion of this community.”
These figures form the block around which Jonas writes her stirring, loquacious and never uncommitted homage to Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” the meditation on the Great Depression and Second World War that launched Miller’s Broadway career back in 1947. For Miller, it was the implied masculinity of the world of business that kept high the head of Joe Keller, played in more recent Broadway and West End revivals by John Lithgow, Bill Pullman and Tracy Letts. It’s his character description, “a man among men” that lends itself for the title of Jonas’ pointed, off-Broadway reinterpretation. Jonas’ play is the first in a cycle of her reimagining of “canonical American male-experience plays for other people, mostly women.” These are set to later include ‘Long Days’ Journey Into Night,’ ‘Zoo Story,’ ‘True West’ and ‘American Buffalo.’
Played by longtime New York acting scene regular Dee Pelletier — she, fittingly, has a brief, bit role in the first season of Girls — Cleo carries that tragic, misguided pride and cheery over-excitedness that lifts the production’s tone out of the austerity of Aruter Miller’s postwar morality into a kind of handmade, playful magical realism. A tone that veers constantly toward twee without crossing the line. Instead, around a circle of lawn chairs, Cleo and her extended family of women go, singing granola hippie songs, having made it out of the counterculture alive with just the clothes off their backs.
And what clothes. Rarely has there been a theater production that has fit so much character in its selections of pants. Tight, denim uniforms; long billowing daytime pajamas. If mental illness and institutionalization takes the place of the collective trauma of Miller’s Second World War in this telling, his re-remembered suburbs remain nonetheless familiar, haunted by death. Directed by Sarah Hughes, another off-broadway luminary, the production riffs repeatedly on the novelty of its modernizing, sometimes semi-suburban corner of Brooklyn and the insistent welcomeness of its hipster theater.
In searching for a place to find her world of women, among women, Jonas lands in Northampton, the Massachusetts town surrounding Smith College, once among the country’s most prominent womens’ colleges. “I didn’t know what it meant to be ‘A woman among women,’ and so this play is an attempt to discover a version, from my own limited perspective, of what that might mean,” writes Jonas in a note accompanying an email that comes with tickets. To debut this vision in Bushwick feels pointed but not too pointed. The reusable bags feel familiar, more so the banana yellow crocs worn by next door lawyer Christine, played by Brooklyn actor and blogger Brittany Allen, in a outfit that looks plucked from the racks at OPC.
Around a circle they sit, Cleo’s wider circle of women, taking chairs among the audience and talking loudly from them. The most impressive of the group is Tina, played with a kind of Brando-like bravado by Maria-Christina Oliveras, returning to town after a gig on the North American tour of Hadestown. She’s described, in the character notes, as Cleo’s “non-romantic life-partner,” a sort of subtle social role Jonas has excavated that feels exclusively located in the territory of a kind of social womanness. Annie Fang, who had shown up in Jonas’ Lincoln Center play, “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” shows up playing both a neighborhood eight year old latchkey kid and, with the addition of a jacket, the elderly mother of Cleo’s daughter’s husband. He’s a figure of desire for Cleo’s other daughter too. These gestures feel graceful and modern and come off deliberately, right on the creeping corner of camp.
The men are not villains, but nevertheless move in and out of the circle in perhaps the same way Miller saw the role of wives, measures of the outside world who enter the stage to bring news of dramatically revealing emails. The most likable of these is Drew Lewis’s Lane, the bumbling nextdoor stay-at-home dad who plays an acoustic guitar and eventually leads the audience in number of collective synchronized clapping routines. The noise is, largely, the point; with the stage turning, at times, into a crowded Altman-esque tone poem on important second wave feminist conceits, a riveting gesture toward what could perhaps be called 20th Century Women-core.
The earnest production choices nods to the company’s roots as an experimental space, a semi-hidden second-floor loft where prominent theater directors like Rachel Chavkin would try out ideas too outré for the other side of the river. When we come to Cleo’s tragic fall, after it’s discovered that her granola-brain suspicion of bipolar medications indirectly led to her daughter going out and nearly killing someone, a kind of macabre suburban drama, half of the chairs have already been rearranged, a metaphor for the play’s moving restlessness.
‘Women Among Women’ runs at Bushwick Starr from October 15 to November 10, at its new address at 419 Eldert Street, near the Halsey L. Tickets run for $27.85. Find available dates here.
Photos taken by Valerie Terranova.
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