A 1982 CLASSIC
THAT REFUSES TO AGE

Raven Theatre’s revival lets Churchill’s blistering
feminist satire land without cosmetic updates

Yourtana Sulaiman, Hannah Kato, Claire Kaplan,
Luke Halpern, Morgan Lavenstein, and Susaan Jamshidi

Almost 45 years after its debut, Caryl Churchill’s seminal play is as depressingly relevant as ever.

In 1982, three years after Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, playwright Caryl Churchill debuted Top Girls off-West End at the Royal Court Theatre. A fiendishly clever examination of feminism—and feminism in the context of capitalism—in the late 20th century, the play received strong but guarded praise to begin with, but over time its reputation increased and solidified to the extent that it is now considered one of the best British plays of the 20th century.

But it is now 2026—forty-four years later—and we have a new Top Girls on stage at Raven Theatre in Rogers Park. Would it be updated? Edited? Reconceived? Overwhelmed with a glitzy production? Any of the things that ambitious directors do to bring old plays into a different era?

The answer to all of those questions is a resounding, “No.”

Susaan Jamshidi and Claire Kaplan

Top Girls opens on Joonhee Park’s ultra-modern restaurant set: white polished marble, with a long table laid for a dinner party. The only color on stage comes from the sea-green chargers. One of the waitstaff pops a cassette tape into their Walkman (ugh…I’m old), allowing the score to elegantly bridge the diegetic and the non-diegetic (kudos to Dee Etti-Williams for the crafty sound design). This motif is repeated to excellent effect between scene changes. There is a clever hidden element to the set that I will not reveal, except to say that, combined with Ben Carne’s lighting design, its effect is delightfully funny.

Morgan Lavenstein and Claire Kaplan and Luke Halpern

Marlene is throwing a party. One of the office workers in an employment agency, she has just been promoted to management—and not just promoted, but promoted over a man. Her guest list is composed of women, both real and imagined, from the annals of history. There’s nineteenth-century Scottish explorer Isabella Bird; thirteenth-century Japanese concubine Lady Nijo; a female pope, Pope Joan, also from the thirteenth century—the official story now being that she never existed (I choose to ignore that story); and two characters from literature and art: Patient Griselda from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Dull Griet, the housewife who leads the pillaging of hell in the Flemish painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Luke Halpern, Hannah Kato, and Claire Kaplan

Strong women from throughout history are here to celebrate Marlene. The conversations overlap, a considerable amount of alcohol is consumed, and as they get drunk, they get feisty—arguing about their place in society as women and how they subverted expectations, overtly or sub rosa. All of them, that is, except for Dull Griet, who remains monosyllabic until the very end of the act. That said, if there’s a dinner party that could not be improved by a middle-aged housewife in battle armor yelling out “soup” or “big cock” with the same intensity, I don’t want to hear about it.

Luke Halpern and Collin Quinn Rice

The play takes a sharp turn in Acts II and III, pivoting to a harshly realistic tone. Angie, a sixteen-year-old dropout, is huddled in a ramshackle backyard playhouse with her best (only?) friend, a twelve-year-old girl named Kit, making plans to kill her mother and run away to the city. This aspect of Top Girls has always made me uncomfortable: using Kit’s age and their relationship as commentary on Angie’s immaturity and intelligence. Thankfully, Collin Quinn Rice (who also plays the poker-faced head of the waitstaff in the first act) is absolutely hilarious. Beautifully replicating the cadences of pre-teens and wielding razor-sharp comic timing, Rice walks away with the scene every time they step on stage as Kit. The set-up still chafes, but humor is an effective bandage.

We then shift to Marlene’s office, where she deals with the fallout of her promotion and the surprise visit of Angie. As it turns out, Angie is her niece—and has come to stay permanently. Complications ensue. Soon we move into a brutal third act, set a year before the present events, where everything comes to a head.

Collin Quinn Rice and Yourtana Sulaiman

Claire Kaplan makes for a splendid Marlene, refusing to soften the character in the slightest. The girl-boss emulating the ultimate toxic girl-boss Thatcher, Marlene is deeply unlikable even before her selfishness reveals itself. The power of the performance lies in the fact that we understand why she behaves as she does. Kaplan even pulls off the most difficult dialogue in the play: a raging monologue defending her choices and, by extension, defending Thatcherism—the most callous, self-centered version of capitalism this side of objectivism. It’s the only overt polemic in the script and, dropping as it does into the kitchen-sink drama portion of the play, can often feel like an especially actorly moment. Not here. Kaplan delivers it with such ferocity that she nearly makes you believe it. It was at this point that I finally succumbed to the despair that had been creeping up on me through the first two acts, as funny as they are.

Claire Kaplan

Four decades later, almost nothing has significantly changed. A few chronological edits could be made here and there—call out to Alexa instead of pressing play on a Walkman; substitute Thatcher for your current reactionary of choice—but every note would land the same. Director Lucky Stiff does a fine job shepherding strong performances from the entire cast, but the masterstroke is simply leaving the script alone: putting a 1982 play before a 2026 audience and trusting them to connect the dots themselves—waiting for the moment when the penny drops and the jokes begin to catch in their throats.

How little we have progressed, and how far we still have to go.

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photos by Joe Mazza

Top Girls
Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sun at 3
ends on March 22, 2026
for tickets ($20-$40, visit Raven Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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