Pugnacious and poignant. The intertwining of these two words, which share much in common but have profound differences, aptly describe many a longterm relationship.
So it is with Mary Woolley and Jeanette Marks, whose up-and-down coupledom is the thumping heart of “Bull In A China Shop”, playwright Bryna Turner’s gutsy political romance, now on stage in a handsome production at the Aurora Theatre Company.
Woolley was Marks’ professor at Wellesley College when the real-life pair first met in the mid-1890s. Turner’s play, inspired by their story opens in 1901, as they move from Boston to rural Massachusetts where Woolley, 38, has been hired for the presidency of what is now Mount Holyoke College (Then referred to as a “Female Seminary”) and fast-forwards through a highlight reel of their fractious but enduring partnership over more than three decades.
While Woolley (Stacy Ross) and Marks (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong), 12-years her junior, bond over their passionate proto-feminism, the tensions in their relationship are clear from even this early stage: Woolley aims to drive social change as an institutional insider, redefining her era’s notions of women’s college as an upper-class “school for wives” by eliminating coursework in the likes of domestic science and equestrian studies in favor of serious academic studies of philosophy, political science and literature, akin to what male students of the time might pursue. While Marks benefits by being appointed as one of the college’s youngest English professors—and ultimately chair of the department—she resents moving from the city to the sticks and being asked to live in the shadow of her partner.
In an early, troubling sacrifice to political prudency, Woolley decides that, until a promised President’s House is built on campus, she must live apart from Marks, relegating her lover to faculty housing. Nonetheless, Woolley flaunts this official discretion by visiting each night for bedtime affection, then returning to her own quarters. Meanwhile, firebrand Marks’ anti-patriarchal pedagogy—which includes al fresco classes, shared cigarettes, and a syllabus charmingly highlighted by Virginia Woolf’s gender-dismantling “Orlando”—stirs protests from parents and donors who Woolley is left to manage.
The couple’s biggest conflict comes nearly twenty years later when Woolley cautiously turns down an invitation to speak at a public rally for women’s right to vote. In contemporary parlance, theirs is a love story between a career diplomat and a social justice warrior. (“Would you rather have a handful of small victories, or a lifetime of rigid defeat?” is one of the dialogue’s most interesting provocations). Along with Woolley and Marks’ intense mutual admiration and sexual attraction (Director Dawn Monique Williams orchestrates some gooseflesh-inducing bedroom scenes), their small-but-significant generation gap and differences in activist modus operandi are baked into the bedrock of their relationship.
Despite the fact that decades pass and society convulses—World War I, women’s suffrage and Woolley’s eventual dismissal from her presidency all take place within the play’s historical timeframe—“Bull and a China Shop” is primarily focused on the recursive theme and variations of a couple’s life. Years rush by, but there’s a metronomic steadiness at the heart the play. Tensions and passions build to a head, then release, then rebuild in the braided double helix of enduring partnership.
Counterbalancing Turner’s choice to emphasize X-ray depth rather than panoramic sweep is a spryness in both the script and Aurora’s punchy staging that keeps the action lively and the audience on its toes. The dialogue is slap-your-face fresh, peppered with F-words and wisecracks and contemporary slang (Marks’ students are described as “shipping” her not-so-secret entwinement with Woolley, a fan-fiction derived term for encouraging a romantic relationship previously unfamiliar to this ancient mariner of a critic).
Ross and Mbong are both superbly self-possessed and magnetically attractive, swashbuckling their individual and shared paths forward while unbuckling preconceptions about butch-femme roles in lesbian partnerships. Shiny-eyed, chipper Jasmine Milan Williams nearly steals the show as Marks’ most ardent pupil and would-be side joint, Pearl, capturing the over-the-top angst of adolescence with a pining, pouting, poetry-reciting fervor.
Ulises Alcala lusciously layers an abundance of textiles in costumes that exult in androgyny without ever feeling inappropriate to the play’s period; Marks’ tux-style blouses and Woolley’s deceptively skirt-like pantaloons could easily move from the stage to a magazine fashion spread. And Nina Ball’s nifty scenery, with its secret sliding drawers, rotating panels and floating roof eaves work beautifully with the Aurora’s compact thrust stage.
“Bull In A China Shop” finds horniness in the horns of dilemma and crashes through stereotypes of dry, diorama-like bio-plays. It’s a rabble-rousing evening of education in American women’s history and universal ways of love.
