‘Forgotten Woman’ Kicks Off Season at Bay Street
In Jonathan Tolins’s excellent new play, “The Forgotten Woman,” which is now having its world premiere at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor through June 19, an opera singer named Margaret seems to have it all. She is a rising diva set to star at the Civic Opera House in Chicago for an important series of concerts. She is a mother, a wife, and enjoys a prosperous living. She has a dedicated husband, Rudolph, who supports her career and serves as her voice coach. And her agent, Eric, is intently vying to sign her to a long-term contract.
When an old friend writing for a prominent Chicago newspaper comes to town to interview her, however, the facade of Margaret’s life slowly begins to unravel.
The writer, Steve, is a celebrity interviewer who describes his subjects (tellingly, as it turns out) as “black holes of neediness.” Steve, we soon learn, is a kind of seducer, a parasite-writer who disarms his subjects in order to suck whatever material he can to fuel his poison pen. Almost immediately we learn that Steve and Margaret went to the same high school and starred in the class play together, and he ends up using this relationship against her. This parasitic technique is also a kind of literary device, of course, allowing Mr. Tolins to deconstruct Margaret before our eyes.
As the play opens, Rudolph and Eric pace anxiously in a midlevel Chicago hotel suite, awaiting the arrival of an interviewer from whom they are hoping to glean a winning profile (the hotel-room set, incidentally, is beautifully put together by Tim Mackabee, its creepy antiseptic quality serving to enhance the sterile veneer of Margaret’s life). When Steve shows up and he and Margaret identify each other as old friends, the glad-handing goes into overdrive. Margaret is their cash cow, and husband and agent can’t help but interrupt the interviewer every time the exchange moves away from the puff piece they desire. We see right away that this is a woman in a glass cage, but Margaret is so blowsy and honest that the audience can tell the glass will shatter long before it actually does.
As the play progresses, the “black hole of neediness” becomes a metaphor for nearly all the characters, but it’s Margaret for whom the emptiness looms largest.
The performers are uniformly excellent, especially Mr. Goldstein, who gives a subtle turn as a writer who uses his burly handsomeness as a weapon of disarmament. He is immensely likable as the play begins, affable and unpretentious, and it is a testimony to the actor that even after his personal corruption is exposed, you still don’t have the heart to dismiss him as a villain.
Both Robert Stanton as Rudolph and Mark Junek as Eric do well to capture the desperation of men whose livelihoods hang in the balance of Margaret’s mercurial nature. They are at turns obsequious and scolding with their star, and as Rudolph goes for his second scotch from the hotel minibar you begin to feel that all is not right in the marriage. Mr. Stanton’s big scene, where he lectures Steve on the death of Western culture, is carried off with just the right amount of pre tension and true moral outrage — he is by turns insufferable and entirely justified. And Mr. Junek finds a real chemistry with Ashile Atkinson, who plays Margaret. He too is a betrayer, as it turns out, but their unspoken friendship is so credible that the viewer cannot help but believe it when she forgives him.
The plum role, of course, is Ms. Atkinson’s as Margaret, and it is not an easy one. A self-described “fat girl,” Margaret is a little vulgar and spends a good amount of the play excoriating herself and professing her personal emptiness. Ms. Atkinson is obliged to shuttle from humiliation to dignity, sometimes in the same scene, and while the character seems off-putting at first, Ms. Atkinson eventually wins over the audience with Margaret’s brutal honesty and quest for self-respect. And she wrests real emotion from the play’s climax, where, after all her illusions have been stripped, she can’t help but bellow, “What’s happening to my life!”
Underused is Justin Mark as Jordan, a bellboy who surveys the goings-on in Margaret’s suite with a rueful smile that becomes a subtle version of a Greek chorus.
Is the ending a little tidy? Not everything works out for Margaret in “The Forgotten Woman,” but there’s something a little mechanistic: All the gears mesh at the play’s conclusion. Let no one say Mr. Tolins is a writer of loose ends. Nevertheless, this is a funny and emotionally satisfying new play that will most likely have a life after its run in Sag Harbor. In the meantime, enjoy this excellent kick-off to Bay Street’s summer season.