UNCOMMON WOMEN

Uncommon Women

Reviewed by Richard Eder

· Uncommon Women is about women in a time of changing traps.

· The play deals with feminist ideas but it is not so much interested in traps as in the women.

· The women are a group of friends at Mount Holyoke.

· We see them in flashbacks that take off from a reunion they hold 6 years after graduation.

· The institution is caricatured to a degree, largely through the personage of Susie, who is a comic cartoon, very funny but hardly believable.

Her opposite, Carter, a genius freshman who sits catatonically on the floor practicing typing to the rhythm of the ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus and plans to make a movie about Wittgenstein.

· There is Kate, handsome, active, programmed for success as a future lawyer but terrified by it.

· There is Muffet, who is torn between being liberated and wanting to find her Prince.

· There is Rita, quirky, funny and appealing, with her detailed obsession with the sexual aspects of liberation and her determination to be a fantastic person by the time she is thirty.

· There is Holly, rich, overweight, full of longing and indecision.

· On the other hand, Samantha has made her choice. She is a sunny and exuberant character and announces that she is getting married.

· The characters represent familiar alternatives and contradictions.

· Miss Wasserstein has made each of them most real.

· Uncommon Women contains enough specific sex talk to cover the walls of every women’s lavatory in the World Trade Center.

· It is believable, sometimes funny and sometimes touching, but it becomes excessive.

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Academic year 2008/2009