Clare Boothe LuceRessenyes

adult drama; women/divorce in the 1960s. As mentioned in one of the special features on Mad Men. Kind of interesting as a historical perspective, but kind of unremarkable otherwise.

I'm trying to keep in mind when this play was written and all, but holy jeebus I was really annoyed with pretty much every character, even when they were being hilarious.

I'm sure I'm missing some higher point here but with plays, where the dialogue is everything, I find it hard to accommodate talk over why one character's cook brings out such drab meals or why the Princess is trading on her title in the department store dressing room. Men - even the presumed best of them - are resigned to being shallow cheaters and still somehow fought over by the women.

Class divisions and gender divisions are very actively drawn here, even as the women themselves seem to find multiple methods by which to be mean to each other. As they say, 'When you have friends like these...' While it seems clear that Luce is commenting on the shallowness of rich women (to a certain degree anyway), I find it hard to read a play where the characters are for the most part wholly unsympathetic.

Substance: Character study of women reacting to straying husbands, with a few straying wives included. Hate masquerading as friendship. Pride leading to fall. That sort of thing. The protagonist is charming, but the husband may not deserve his second chance.
Style: 1950s tone and sentiments. Black and white cinematography with a color interpolation of a fashion show, just for fun. Has male characters off-stage, but none ever appear on-screen.
NOTES: A later remake is lacking, says my friend S.M.

The play The Women by Clare Booth Luce is a drama which examines marriage and it's impact on a small group of wealthy socialites in the 1960's. The first scene presents a revelation that sets a domino effect of events that is basically comprised by affairs, gossip and divorce. It paints a pretty grim and hopefully inaccurate picture of women and their "friendships."

This isn't a timeless drama...thankfully. It wasn't all that entertaining or realistic either. Luce's views on men and marriage may have been shocking and groudbreaking at the time, but in 2009 it reads as cliched and uninspired.

Mrs. Luce's second play, a three-act bitchfest that ran for 657 performances on Broadway and was subsequently adapted into a somewhat Production Code-sanitized but still plenty snappy MGM film by screenwriters Anita Loos and Jane Murfin (with an uncredited contribution by F. Scott Fitzgerald!) and director George Cukor, and, much later, became the basis of a pointless Meg Ryan/Annette Bening vehicle. Although it was a hit, the play was not well-reviewed, and in her Foreword to this published text, the author presents an amusing but pointed rebuttal to critics, in the course of which she presents 'a partial list of the descriptive nouns and adjectives applied by the Gentlemen of the Press to the Ladies of the Ensemble.' 78 examples are presented (among them 'odious harpies,' 'zoological freaks,' 'a smelly lot' and 'adder-fanged'), and at the end of the list she drolly notes that these are 'in the aggregate much harsher language than the dialogue [of the play itself].'½

2