Off-Broadway Review: FIVE MODELS IN RUINS, 1981 (LCT3 at the Claire Tow Theatre, Lincoln Center)

THE BACCHAE WEAR BRIDAL

You remember the Bacchae – don’t you ? – those wild women of Thebes in Euripides’s ancient drama who, transformed by Dionysus, terrorized Pentheus’s kingdom with their orgiastic violence?

Well, they’re back, raging again, in Caitlin Saylor Sterling’s strange and exotic new play at Lincoln Center, Five Models in Ruins, 1981.

Elizabeth Marvel

This time they appear in the form five fashion models, on a job in an abandoned estate in Surrey, England in 1981. Their assignment is to don five designer wedding gowns that Princess Diana rejected for a photo that will appear on the cover of Vogue in October. For Roberta, the photographer (Elizabeth Marvel), the stakes are high. Her editor (whom she’s desperately loved for decades) has forever been dangling the possibility of a cover photo, and this might be her big break.

Essentially, the action of the play takes place on the set of a deserted mansion (designed by Afsoon Pajoufar). The models undress and don their fabulous wedding gowns (designed by Vasilija Zivanic) in a dressing area stage right, while Roberta sets up the photo shoot in the living room stage left. To either side, there are tall, overgrown grasses. It’s a surreal scene of decadence and decay.

The Cast

Though nothing much happens in these scenes back-and-forth between the dressing room and the photo prep, the playwright takes the opportunity to dramatize the humiliating, degrading life of women in the fashion industry. The models compete with each other, sharing details of their frequent sexual encounters. Chrissy (the statuesque Stella Everett) boasts the largest number of conquests (including Prince!), explaining that she likes to be demeaned. They trade traumatic stories of their “worst shoot ever.” Chrissy describes how she once had to pose in a crime scene with dead bodies. Tati (Maia Novi), the snarky Eastern European model, reports that she was once forced to have sex with a photographer while he took her picture. Alex (Britne Oldford) wins with a macabre story of a shoot in Brazil where she is trapped in an airplane for days, starving. (The gentle Grace, played by Sarah Marie Rodriguez, has no story – it’s her first shoot.) Even Roberta, the photographer, joins in, admitting she’s never made the cover of a magazine in twenty-five years. They all confess that they cry all the time. “Behind every bitch is an infinite wall of pain,” Alex remarks.

Elizabeth Marvel and Sarah Marie Rodriguez

Ultimately, a fifth woman arrives, scratched and bleeding. She’s the make-up artist named Sandy (Madeline Wise), who hitched a ride to the shoot and fled the car for fear of being molested. Roberta asks her to join in as the fifth model.

Thanks to the gorgeous set and costumes and Morgan Green’s dynamic direction, the production is a visual feast. Between each of the short scenes, the models dance and cavort, assuming striking, surreal poses. It’s fascinating to watch. After eighty-five minutes of this ninety-five-minute play, however, I wondered where it was going.

Sarah Marie Rodriguez, Stella Everett, Britne Oldford, Maia Novi

And then comes the Bacchae moment. After a twenty-four-hour photo session while Roberta struggles to find the ideal pose, the exhaustion and frustration of the ensemble reaches the boiling point. Suddenly, Roberta is interrupted by a call from her editor, saying that the shoot is cancelled. Whereupon the five models and the photographer erupt in a massive meltdown, with screams and cries and wails that last for a full five minutes, shaking the walls of the Claire Tow Theater. Finally, the furious frenzy subsides, and the exhausted ensemble members collapse on the floor. In that moment, the photographer finds the ideal shot for the Vogue cover she will never have.

As it happens, this play is based on an actual photo shoot in 1981 by a photographer named Deborah Turbeville (other references to the editor and model agency are historically accurate, too).

Madeline Wise and Elizabeth Marvel

So what is the purpose of telling the story, I wonder, from the playwright perspective? Is she saying something about women’s rage over the millennia – from the Furies and the Bacchae in mythology, to the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, to the possessed schoolgirls in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible? Does their rage have a justification when it comes to women’s quest for agency and power? Is violent catharsis indeed part of their passage? To complete the metaphor, there’s Diana herself – also a goddess of the ancient world, whose spirit haunts the scene. Does her rejection of five wedding gowns represent a rejection of a male-dominated world, in the struggle for women’s self-definition and dignity? Moreover, does the decaying estate where the play takes place represent our own decadent society?

Whatever the reason for reimagining this particular event, the playwright has offered us an evening of thought-provoking, curiously fascinating entertainment.