Sparkling 1930s social comedy

The Skidmore Theater Department will present Clare Boothe Luce's classic 1936 comedy, The Women, in seven performances starting Friday, Nov. 20, in the College's Bernhard Theater.  Performances will begin at 8 p.m. Nov. 20 and 21, and Dec. 3, 4, and 5, and at 2 p.m. on Sundays Nov. 22 and Dec. 6. Tickets are $12 for general admission and $8 for students, senior citizens, and the Skidmore community. For reservations and information, call the Bernhard Theater box office at 518-580-5439.

Directed by Senior Artist-in-Residence Alma Becker, The Women follows the glittering romantic downs and ups of New York socialite Mary Haines. Her catty girlfriends urge her into a divorce when Crystal Allen, a gold-digging shop girl at a department-store perfume counter, catches her husband's eye. The story swings from Manhattan's elegant Park Avenue?where the ladies lunch, get manicures, swap gossip and husbands?to Reno, Nev., where they bond while awaiting divorce decrees. Besides glamour, gossip, and fashion, The Women also touches on class struggle, friendship, divorce, and fidelity as Mary decides to fight for her man with pluck and a fresh coat of Jungle Red nail polish.

Immensely popular in its day, The Women was adapted into an equally successful 1939 film, directed by George Cukor, and a less well-received version produced in 2008. (A trailer for the 1939 film promised to portray "dowagers and debutantes, chorines and mannequins ? out of the boudoir and onto the screen, with their hair down and their claws out.") With its caustic humor and cast of stylish, bold, and saucy characters, the 1930s play raises unsettling questions about friends, enemies, and the power of gossip that are still pertinent in 2009, according to Becker.

The Skidmore production brings a contemporary sensibility and experience to the play and its characters, says Becker. But "one of the pleasures of working on a 1930s comedy," she adds, "is to invoke the fashion and manners of the time," including the Art Deco stage environment created by Skidmore faculty designers Garett Wilson (for scenic design) costumer Patty Pawliczak, and David Yergan (lighting). The all-female student cast includes Kimberly Brown '10 as Mary (the role played by a sweet-faced Norma Shearer in 1939) and Starry Krueger '10 in the Joan Crawford role of "the other woman," Crystal.  Nineteen Skidmore students complete the cast, in roles such as dowager, pedicurist, model, princess, debutante, and "girl in distress."