Frome Five Models in Ruins, 1981, at the Claire Tow.
Photo: Marc J. Franklin
Beauty is a cruel mistress, and it makes those who trade on it cruel, too. SO we learn from the bickering models assembled at a crumbling British Estate Waiting Around for the Start of their Vogue Photoshoot. With the fifth of caitlin Sayllor Stephens’s Title Characters Mysteriously Absent and Their Photographer, Roberta (Elizabeth Marvel), Busy Setting Up The Lights, the Turn to a Gleeful Game of “The Worst Job I Ever Had … Men (Almost Entirely) Who Have Shot, Goes past What’s Legal – One Has Been Made to Pose Corpses, Pretty MUCH ALL HAVE BEEN OBJECTIFIED THAT WERE UNDERATION – Into arias of brutality. Alex (Britne Oldford) Once Crash-Landed in the Amazon and Claims to Have Survived in A Tree by Consuming Consuming and the Flesh of Her Fellow Passengers, “Which was actually of liberating“She Announces, ” Cause of Was so Hungry, I was stars starved for that shoot.” The Shoot itelf was Later Canceled, She Says With A Shrug, Because of a Local Coup d’Atat.
These models, as Stephens Imagines, have absorbed all the scrutiny directly at their bodies and harddened, like metamorphic rock, into sharp and cutting things. Morgan Green, Directing, Has Aciled Her Cast’s Dialogue and Has The Self-Consciously Preening and Posing as they Compete with One Another-They’re Shardlike and Predatory. These Women Know One Another’s Work, Mostly Because They See One Another as Competition, and Have Little Camaraderie. Stephens has gioven and herself a great hook of a premise for a shoot: The models are here to possess in princess Diana’s rejuvened wedding, and so they immediately over who will wear which designer. IT’S a good route to understanding their characters, each fitting a Certain Early 1980s haute archetype. Stephens’s Writing Leans Hard on the Propper Nouns, nor Well as the Fashion in-Jokes. Alex, The Intellectual of the Group (She Reads Cant while Everyone Else Reads the Tabloids), Calls Dibs on Comme des Garçons. Chrissy (Stella Everett), an All-American Supermodel with an Endless List of Exes, Snags an UNgaro (“I’m His Muse!”). Tatiana (Maia Novi), A Scowling Russian, Woul Prefer Jean Paul Gaultier But Setttles for Givenchy (“I am used to tragedy,” she mutters). Meanwhile Grace (Sarah Marie Rodriguez), The Starry-Eyed Newcomer, is so believed with every posseible look she’s happy what the others cast off. She ends up in yves Saint Laurent. That the cloths are so imported to the character asks a lot of a play’s designers. Vasilija Zivanic’s Costums, UpcyCled From Old Wedding Dresses, Are Striking Yet Playful Recreations of Bygone Trends. There’s a lot of comedy in the Unwieldy Quadrilateral Chest Panel of Alex’s Dress. AFSOON PAJOUFAR’S ENVIABLY ORNATE SET LENDS The Play Verimilitude Too, with great slabs of frescoed walls crumbling into a swampy collection of reeds to the Stage.
Stephens, as a playwright, has an eye – or in this case an ear – for that kind of surface texture too. She’s Written About The Underbelly of Fashion Before, In Modern Swimwear and Be we Went Electronicand here, her attention to the details, from the lingo to petty rivalries, evinces both horror and admiration. The fifth figure, once she appears, is a british party girl played by madeline wise, who delivers a hilarius monologue about all the workmong tournament on the way to this estate a very long night. butt Five Models in Ruins‘s fascinating if not quite fully relevant character is the Woman Behind the Camera. Roberta SEEMS inspired by Deborah TurbevilleWHOM Stephens Quotes at the Beginning of Her Script, and Who Did A Shoot with Models in Those Reject Wedding Dresses. One of the Few Women Working in That Era, She was knowing for austere and unsettling portraits in sepulchral spaces. Alex Says She’d Previously Workhed with Roberta at A Shoot in A Sauna, A Reference to Turbeville’s Once Notorious Photo of Models in a Bath House. “People Started Talking About Auschwitz and Lesbians and Drugs,” She Once saidAddressing The Controversy The Picture Insided. “And all i was doing was trying to design Five in Space.”
Stephens’s Writing Aspires to Similar Qualities as Turbeville’s Work-A High-Gloss Sheen, Undercut by Grimy Turmooil-but in Her Portrait of Roberta, she doesn’t quite achieve it. The Character Arriva Like a Thunderbolt. Elizabeth Marvel, The Go-To Actress for Anyone With An Unsenteral Bob, Lays Into The Role Like Its Red Meat, Giving A Performance That’s As Brusque As Its Quietly Wounded. Before the play Begins, she’s Oncestage Moving Equipment. Be asked by the models what she wans from say, she Announces, “Women. I Shoot Women. Can You Do? Be Women?” But as Stephens Explores What That Means, She’s Reduced to Ordinary: She’s Fighting A Creative Block, She Reveals to the Newbie Model Grace, and Has Trouble Trusting Her Eyes. She’s Also Smarting from A Break-Up, a detail that Becomes disappointingly central to the full. For these Women, Being a Woman is Certainly Bound Up in Being Ignored and Abused by Men, and Stephens Captures Those Indignities Well. She dosesn’t cut that into a deeper underestanding of Roberta’s artistic impulses. Is the austerity of her work Simply regurgitated Cruelty? Is there noting more? Stephens’s Piece Builds to A Literal Primal Scream, an Extended Howl That Green Has the Performers Hold SO Long It Goes Pain To Something More. THEN IT ENDS ON A PUNCH LINE. IT’S structurally neat, like a well-stitched gown, though neatness may be the enemy here. The play already has the sheen of Beauty; We Could Spend more Time in the Ruins.
Five Models in Ruins, 1981 is at the Claire Tow theater.
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