“The Women” leaves timeless messages
Playwright’s relative to attend show, share memories
By S.L. Wykes

Fashion editor, journalist, congresswoman, and ambassador, Clare Booth Luce was never one to hold back. When her play “The Women” opened on Broadway in the midst of the Great Depression, and playgoers saw a groupd of very pampered society ladies up on stage, she was roundly criticized for the play’s outspoken portrayal of their insular lives.

But people showed up to see it. The play ran for 657 performances, toured for two years and was a big hit in 1939 when George Cukor put Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Joan Craford into a film version that lost little of the play’s sharp edge.

Nearly 70 years later, the play’s “basic emotions that all of these people go through,” said Hillbarn Theatre’s artistic director Toni Tomei, makes it a treasure with “timeless messages.”

“The Women” opened the Hillbarn’s 63rd season, and as it nears the end of its run, Clare Luce Abbey, the playwright’s granddaughter, will attend the Sunday afternoon performance and afterward share memories of her famous namesake with the audience.

“I had more candid conversations with her than I ever did with my mother,” Luce Abbey said.

Luce paid attention to her grandchild, listened to her, nurtured her intellect and, when she was old to appreciate them, told her stories about how the play came to be written.

How it started

“it all came out of an evening of eavesdropping in the ladies room of the Waldorf Hotel,” said Luce Abbey, “She went into a stall, heard these theses three ladies talking about a fourth. She would not leave the stall. Finally she emerged from the ladies room. It had been 20 minutes, and needless to say, my grandfather was really annoyed.”

In the three days that followed, the play was written. It featured more than 40 roles – no men, only women – and flowed the change in the life of Mary Haines, a way-too-nice woman who discovers her husband is having an affair with a seductive conniver.
By the time the play is finished, Haines is far less nice. The play’s become famous for one line about her painting her nails “jungle red” as she goes out to wage battle for her husband. But there are other famous lines, too, that compare a virgin to a frozen asset and describe the modern function of friendship among women as “orgasm by gossip.”

A different time

Luce, whose ambition and talent and fortuitous marriages put her squarely in the middle of the feckless society she satirized, was quite certain that the image of women she drew in this play was not complete condemnation.

“My villainess skullduggery is far from fiendish,” she wrote in a forward to a published version, “…I truly, heartily and thanfully echo the cry of all who have been revolted by the specific bitterness of “The Women” that “all women are not like that!”(It would be a sad world if they were – as indeed it is a sad world anyway.)”

For the Hillbarn, the play was not without challenge. It’s a small theatre, just175 seats, not sets for the play cannot be expansive. But the play had other benefits, Tomei, who’d heard complaints from local actors about a lack of roles for women, was able to cast 21 for this production. 10 actors play just one character, but 11 play multiple roles to cover the 44 speaking parts.

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