‘TOP GIRLS’ AT REP QUESTIONS ROLES

SAN DIEGO — Have women sold out as a trade for power? Do we face greater challenges to our personal integrity because motherhood and fatherhood are not the same thing?

Playwright Caryl Churchill makes much of these issues in “Top Girls.” Director Meg Wilbur, hired by the San Diego Repertory Theatre to stage the contemporary British writer’s socialist-feminist opus, shared her own thoughts on them recently.

Churchill’s play, which opens Wednesday in the Rep’s Lyceum Space, begins with a dinner party. To celebrate a recent promotion, 20th-Century Marlene has invited a rather unusual handful of guests, all of them relatively unknown but extraordinary women of history. Pope Joan from the 9th Century, Victorian explorer Isabella Bird, Japanese courtesan Lady Nijo and our modern Marlene are derived from “real” individuals, while dull Gret steps off a Brueghel painting and patient Griselda comes from Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.”

Later scenes in Marlene’s London employment agency feature the same actresses playing contemporary roles. Churchill leaves the historical characters behind and focuses on Marlene’s professional success--and personal failure with her disturbed teen-age daughter, Angie.

“It struck me that she’s showing that women, no matter from what era, face the same questions,” Wilbur said. “We all have had to make sacrifices if we’re going to do anything exceptional in our lives, exceptional in terms of getting beyond the home . . . and I don’t think she intends to say that motherhood is a meager role--but if women are going to have other roles, it seems that they have had to pay an exorbitant price.”

Wilbur, who has invested 10 years in her own career as a professor in UCLA’s theater arts department, is not a mother.

“That, for instance, is one of the reasons I can do this play, just pick up and come down here and be able to live 98% of my life on this show for five weeks, but if I had a little baby, I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It is a pressure and an issue that confronts us as women that doesn’t confront men the same way. So if we make it, in that sense, we do have to be super women.

“I think it’s possible to do it all, but I think we kill ourselves doing it maybe in a way that men don’t have to. You know, we all need a wife. Isn’t that a wonderful function, to be able to go home and have your meal cooked and a clean house?”

Churchill’s play, which won an Obie award in 1983, has been criticized for losing sight of the first scene’s excitement, and for what seems on the surface to be a kind of whining complaint about the challenges women face. But Wilbur believes the playwright raises more serious questions about where we’re headed, not just women but our entire, success-oriented society, which presses a “dog eat dog” mentality upon both sexes.

“You have Marlene’s celebration of her success in the first scene with these women who all are speaking about issues that relate to her life at one level,” Wilbur said. “They’re kind of like alter egos in a sense, and she has them all there and they give her some adulation and she gets challenged with their ideas. Then we see her as a cutthroat executive, very professional--but she’s sold out. She’s sold out her daughter and she’s sold out her family.

“I think (Churchill) is really raising some flags of warning. I think she’s saying the world is in very bad shape. She, as a socialist, believes that Reagan and (British Prime Minister Margaret) Thatcher are doing very bad things for their countries, so she’s saying if everybody with power is selling out and nobody has any heart any more and the women’s movement has just meant just creating ‘me first’ for women, we’re in bad shape.”

“Top Girls” is Wilbur’s first directing assignment outside UCLA since she signed on there to teach the Linklater Method, a voice training technique she studied and taught for seven years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Last year, she served as a dialect coach for several San Diego Rep productions. When they asked her to direct “Top Girls,” Wilbur eagerly accepted, glad the Rep management opted for a woman director.

She said the summer job is giving her a chance to test the waters for her “someday” dream of forming her own theater ensemble, which just might find its home in San Diego. Working in the new, beautifully equipped Lyceum Space has been an added bonus.

“One of the things (directing ‘Top Girls’) has done is that it brought it up closer to me in terms of well, you know, it’s interesting to talk about these issues, but just how much am I really willing to do? I believe the cry of warning that she’s raising--and I’m still interested in having a comfortable home and a nice car and all the good things that our very materialistic society can bring us. I’m not going out and trying to deal with the homeless.

“I guess I feel that by doing plays that have strong messages, I’m doing something. I’m doing what I can do,” she said.

“I think that it’s an exciting time for women in theater because there’s this whole group of women playwrights emerging finally. I think that Churchill is one of the most exciting contemporary dramatists in that sense. I don’t think she gives us any answers. . . . she poses a lot of questions.”