Review: THE PLIANT GIRLS Hits a Feministic Bulls-Eye
By: Maggie Yates Jan. 12, 2015
The buzz around The Pliant Girls is crackling over the communication channels. "Do you want to go see this Fugitive Kind show?" a friend asked me. "People say it's making them believe in the magic of theatre, again."
True, my thespian friends tend to hyperbolize in this dramatic manner, yet the promise (or even the potential) of a show that offers fresh theatrical storytelling is worth a glance. Fugitive Kind, a small non-resident theatre company in Los Angeles, provided an equally enticing description of their Ovation Award-winning production: The Pliant Girls, by Meghan Brown, is an adaptation of Aeschylus' play, The Suppliants, about the mass arranged marriage of 50 women, the Denaids, to their 50 Egyptian cousins (and their subsequent flight to refuge in the kingdom of Argos). Though my awareness of this play came suddenly, my interest in its message and execution runs deep; Fugitive Kind seems to have hit a feministic bulls-eye with their play about social power and impotence as defined by traditional gender politics.
The Pliant Girls places a heavy emphasis on the conventional, male-centric delegation of social power via the de-individualization and objectification of 50 women forced into a mass arranged marriage. However, the play highlights five main female characters in depth, thus cementing the idea of their inherent strength and personal distinctiveness despite being considered property and deprived of freedom. Each woman is portrayed with intricate characterization, and the audience is made aware of their individual strengths as women and as people. Sexuality, intelligence, humor, and compassion are accentuated, as are the scruffier, less palatable expressions of the human experience: anxiety, anger, desperation, fear, and violence. The Pliant Girls presents a genuine feministic sensibility in that it shows the inescapable commonalities of the human experience-those that cross the lines of gender. We all struggle to exemplify the ideals of our cultural behavioral systems-and we all struggle to recognize and protect our sense of individuality and well-being. For the women of The Pliant Girls, acts of self-preservation and the reclamation of power come in the form of (what playwright Meghan Brown calls) "a shocking act of violence (as well as one true act of compassion)."
Both the playwright (Meghan Brown) and the director (Amanda McRaven) received 2014 LA Stage Alliance Ovation Awards for this production. The Pliant Girls was also nominated for another six awards, including Best Play and Best Ensemble. This show, about substantial female characters, written and created by female theatre artists, represents feminism traditionally (in a story of women demanding equality and freedom from male oppression), but also in a more unadulterated sense by illustrating the struggles of humanity as a whole. Through this show, Fugitive Kind makes an effort to foster empathy and acceptance within the audience by reminding us that suffering is an inevitability of the human experience. Brown admits that much of her inspiration for this script came from the realization that those moments in life that everyone feels the most ashamed of are often the most universally relatable. Why then, she wondered, are these experiences so isolating? "The lesson of The Pliant Girls," says Brown, "is that that terrifying chaos affects everyone-and that the only way to make the world more manageable is to operate from a place of true compassion."
Watch for more great work from Fugitive Kind!
Fugitive Kind presents: The Pliant Girls
by Meghan Brown
Directed by Amanda McRaven
January 8-11, 2015
The Colony Theatre, Burbank, CA
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