BULLISH ON WOMEN’S EDUCATION

With sharp, witty, and informative dialogue, Bryna Turner’s Bull in a China Shop offers a fascinating glimpse into the life and accomplishments of Mary Wooley (Linnea Lyerly), the little-known and yet highly influential president of Mount Holyoke College from 1900 to 1937. Wooley transformed a women’s seminary with an emphasis on piety and service to a college with rigorous academic requirements. A lesbian herself, Wooley rejected the assumption that her students were merely preparing for marriage or a career in a nurturing profession. Despite push-back from trustees and donors, she prevailed in her leadership and was recognized in other areas as well, serving on a presidential mission to try to broker a peace deal in 1930s Europe, for example. The play is well-suited to The Treehouse Collective’s stated mission of producing “infrequently performed, ensemble-based work that inspires.”

Hannah Young as Felicity, Linnea Lyerly as Woolley and Heidi White as Marks

Heidi White as Marks

Director Lisa Tierney makes the most of this interesting material. We don’t just learn about Wooley’s professional accomplishments; as portrayed here, she is also balancing the needs and aspirations of her younger partner, Jeannette Marks (Heidi White), who has her own ambitions and resents the move to remote rural Massachusetts. White and Lyerly are a convincing couple—passion, power dynamics, provocations, and all. The two supporting players, Karen Dervin as the sardonic Dean Welsh and Anneke Salvadori as baby lesbian Pearl bring additional complications to Wooley and Marks’s lives.

Karen Dervin as Dean Welsh and Linnea Lyerly as Woolley

Ensemble

The script avoids didacticism with frequent injections of humor and the use of contemporary language (lots of F-bombs and numerous casual idioms like “get a grip!”) that helps us identify with these characters. What the production doesn’t avoid, however, is clumsy staging (Britt Ambruson): while the numerous brief scenes make this a lively and entertaining experience, the frequent and repetitive moving of furniture on and off the stage slows everything down. The lighting (Dan Clawson) is effective, especially in the scene in which faculty and students are jailed for trying to vote—it’s a shame it didn’t occur to someone to leave the furniture in place and simply move our attention from one setting to another with lighting, as was done in that scene. Likewise, changes in costumes (Kiera O’Connor) and signs—either actual or projected—showing the year would have located us in time as this fast-paced production covers decades over 90 entertaining but flawed minutes.

photos courtesy of Treehouse Collective

Bull in a China Shop
The Treehouse Collective
Abbott Memorial Theatre, 9 Spring St. in Waltham, MA
Fri and Sat at 8; Sun at 2
ends on June 29, 2025
for tickets, visit Treehouse