But a storm that can’t be stopped is being discussed in grave and fatalistic tones by the East African women we meet in the first scene of this unresolved work, directed by Whitney White. They have assembled, they say, to tell a story that must be told when the sun comes up again, even as they wish that “we had only the moon to bury.”
The story is that of the occupant of the enclosed, transparent cubicle that looms, both dominant and out of place, from the center of Daniel Soule’s otherwise homespun, rug-strewn set. This cubicle is the office and inescapable prison of the beautiful, ambitious and desperately deracinated Jendyose Najju Nsugwa (Bisserat Tseggai).
“You can just call me Joy,” she says. From the disgusted expression on her face, you can see that she is aware of the irony of her nickname.
It is abundantly clear that joy is the furthest emotion from this woman’s experience of urban life. And from what we’re told by that omnipresent, mythologizing female chorus, made up of relatives from the village that Joy left years ago, we know that the grimmest of destinies awaits her. So why aren’t we feeling the urgency and fear that usually accompany such knowledge?
“For all the women” teems with engaging ideas and arresting images, but they never assume a compelling and coherent form, or even a fluent language of their own. It feels like the work of a gifted and imaginative young playwright with so much to say that she chokes on it.
That turns out to be a fair diagnosis. This drama was written 11 years ago by multifarious Ashton, who as a 35-year-old actress is appearing to dazzling effect in the current revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” on Broadway.
She has described “for all the women” as a “fever dream” generated by the fears and anxieties of a younger self. And while you can understand a director’s impulse to interpret that dream with at least a modicum of clarity, the play might fare (marginally) better in a more phantasmagorical presentation.
I am not blaming inarguably talented White, who oversaw the vibrant off-Broadway sleeper hit “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” which is still running. “For all the women” made its belated debut earlier this month in London, staged by Jo McInnes, and the reviews from there suggest a production that was very different in its directorial approach — but also equally unsatisfying.
That version takes place in London; the Soho Rep incarnation would appear to be set in Manhattan. Either location serves to fuel the play’s central tension between the tradition-rooted, timeless world embodied by the play’s chorus and the harsh here and now of Joy’s professional life in the cosmopolitan West, in an unspecified, high-pressure job.
The attire of cast members underscores this divide. (Andrew Jean did the costumes.) Joy is the image of a Western career woman, with sleek hair and pale pink dress with matching high heels. The women who watch her from the sidelines are first seen in African tribal funeral garb.
Most of these supporting characters change their clothing at some point to step into Joy’s lonely cubicle. (They can get in, but she can’t get out.) In this setting, they are transformed into city people — a rival office worker, a cleaner, a babysitter — who often remind self-invented Joy of home, to her annoyance.
Or perhaps they truly are from Joy’s village in Africa, as Margaret (a very good Sharon Hope), the office cleaner, swears she is. Margaret offers the younger woman herbal remedies for what ails her and walks off with Joy’s pinching shoes and a bottle of prescription pills from her handbag.
Ashton has said that this play was in part inspired by the failures of the British health system in dealing with the problems of female émigrés of color. In performance, this theme takes a long time to register. (Toward the end, Joy consults that clueless white male doctor, played by Gibson Frazier, who is predictably patronizing and unhelpful.)
Both unsubtle and unclear, “for all the women” lacks the wholesale nightmare absurdism that paradoxically might make it easier to, if not follow, then accept. There are some fine brain-scrambling touches. These include a scene in which Joy and her smarmy boss (Frazier again) discuss both the weather and her clothing in slyly racist language, and a bravura segment in which she becomes instantly, visibly pregnant before our eyes.
Tseggai doesn’t provide enough of an emotional range to match Joy’s precipitous descent into unreality; she’s either terse and brittle or screaming and unglued. The show’s most persuasive performances come from the ensemble’s oldest members: Hope and Stephanie Berry, who plays Ruth, Joy’s understandably worried mother back home.
Ruth isn’t an unconditional source of comfort, by the way. The stories she tells of life in the village, where a young mother is drowned as a witch, imply that poisonous sexism isn’t exclusive to the urban West.
“For all the women,” in other words, is by no means a work of simplistic nostalgia. And there are striking elements throughout that you could imagine being reworked into a tighter, stronger play.
After more than a decade, though, Ashton may have had enough of trying to refocus this product of her youth. In any case, it seems unlikely that the bright, shardlike pieces of this inchoate work might ever be assembled to the complete satisfaction of anyone.
——
Production Notes:
‘for all the women who thought they were Mad’Through Nov. 17 at Soho Rep., Manhattan; 866-811-4111, sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
By Zawe Ashton; directed by Whitney White; sets by Daniel Soule; costumes by Andrew Jean; lighting by Stacey Derosier; sound by Lee Kinney; props by Joshua Larrinaga-Yocom; video and projections by Johnny Moreno; hair and wigs by Nikiya Mathis; production stage manager, Chelsea Olivia Friday; technical director, Carl Whipple. Presented by Soho Rep.
Cast: Stephanie Berry, Gibson Frazier, Sharon Hope, Nicole Lewis, Blasina Olowe, Cherene Snow, Bisserat Tseggai, Shay Vawn and Kat Williams.
This article originally appeared in
.