"Coupla White Chicks' by New City Stage (1st review)

When John Ford Noonan's A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking opened in a tiny off-Broadway theater in 1980, the script seemed little more than a flimsy excuse to showcase two star-quality actresses, Susan Sarandon and Eileen Brennan, in front of an intimate audience. Even its loquacious title was, at best, an ironic gimmick: About the only things this play's two characters share in common are their race and gender, and sitting around talking is the one activity they do not engage in.

Absent Sarandon and Brennan or some similarly compelling stage presence, what value could anyone find in such a script? Yet as the current revival by New City Stage demonstrates, A Coupla White Chicks does indeed possess some value— not for any lasting insight into the female psyche or gender relations, but as a reminder of how our perceptions of these subjects have evolved in 30 years.

The play concerns the unlikely relationship between two upscale housewives in Westchester County, New York's golden bedroom community. Maude is a repressed suburban matron who carefully guards her feelings and her privacy. (A day after being raped, she announces, "Yesterday was Wednesday, today is Thursday, and I'm back with my cookies.") Maude's newly arrived next-door neighbor Hannah Mae, by contrast, is an extrovert from Texas with no sense of boundaries, a woman who apparently never has an unspoken thought.

Sisterly solidarity

When Hannah Mae barges through Maude's kitchen door to offer her friendship, Maude's carefully constructed defenses are seriously challenged. (Why doesn't Maude lock her kitchen door? Don't ask.) Eventually this odd couple bond in sisterly solidarity against a common foe: the abuse of their respective husbands. But their alliance lasts only until one of them gets her man back in good working order. Sisterhood is nice, but a woman without a man is incomplete.

Would such a scenario fly today? In the age of computers and Blackberries, many women have discovered that, aside from a few minor tasks— lifting heavy packages, reaching high shelves, singing bass and baritone parts in choruses— they can manage perfectly well without men. They certainly manage perfectly well without them in this play, which is capably acted, directed and produced entirely by women. In that sense, Noonan's script, while entertaining, feels like a museum piece.

Fight scene

Madi Distefano, as the loose-cannon Hannah Mae, draws a wonderful caricature of a hot-blooded Texan plunked clueless into the sedate and urbane East. Amanda Schoonover, as the uptight Maude, is maybe a bit too uptight to seem credible; we never really get a sense of the passion that we're told is bottled up somewhere beneath her reserved exterior.

A down-and-dirty fight scene between the two women struck me as over-the-top but worth noting for the excellent manner in which fight choreographer Alex Cordaro choreographed it. Presumably the show's original audiences got their kicks from watching Sarandon and Brennan scratch at each other.

Absent such star power, this production still provides an entertaining evening as well as cause to reflect that you've come a long way, baby. At the very least, today a play about two women would be written not by a man but by a woman.♦


To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.