The formula has been tried, and it’s proven to be true enough. Caryl Churchill chose it for Top Girls. Steve Allen relied on it for a television series. It could even be said that Friedrich Schiller resorted to it for Mary Stuart.
The formula as applied here: Gather several World War II writers who may never have met and have them sit around gabbing to beat the band. Steven Carl McCasland has done this for Little Wars, a two-hour play first presented off-Broadway in 2014 and now revived in London for streaming with an all-women cast featuring some of the West End’s most outstanding actors, Juliet Stevenson and Linda Bassett the most prominent.
The smart talkers collect at the temporary mountain home in France where Gertrude Stein (Bassett) and her “baby precious” Alice B. Toklas (Catherine Russell) have invited Agatha Christie (Sophie Thompson) over for drinks—lot and lots of drinks. Toklas has kept from Stein the news that Christie will bring with her Lillian Hellman (Stevenson) and Dorothy Parker (Debbie Chazen). She’s been circumspect because she knows Stein has no time for Hellman, whom she regularly addresses as “Lily Ann.” As for Parker, Stein has no idea who she is.
Also present is a woman identifying herself as Mary (Sarah Solemani). She has arrived a day early to collect 150 francs from Stein and Toklas in order to smuggle Jews out of the country. The last of the gossipy septet is Bernadette (Natasha Karp), a young women with a troubled past whom Stein and Toklas have taken in to help around the house.
Since these women, with the exception of the pleasant Bernadette, are extremely articulate—Stein is dubbed “the queen of wordplay”—they all express themselves well. (McCasland is quite up to the challenge he set himself). It shouldn’t be surprising that Stein and Hellman, who admits to having become a “bitch,” don’t lay on the sweetness and light. Far from it. They go after each other verbally. Stein even deliberately spills a drink on Hellman.
In other words, many listening to this virtual gallery of women, directed with acumen by Hannah Chissick, may object to the display of cats getting in each other’s metaphorical hair. Others listening to the nastiness will enjoy the voluble ride.
Just when, though, the hammer-and-tonging is about to reach the gratuitous point, McCasland heaves some dramatic weight into the proceedings. Toklas turns a radio on just in time to learn that Pétain has surrendered France to the Nazis. In the ensuing discussion the inevitable consequences of the horrifying 1941 development disturb the women. Mary decides to talk more freely about her mission to save as many Jews as possible—with Hellman grilling her about the efficacy of her endangered task. Bernadette’s past also comes under examination. (This streamed production is a fundraiser for Women for Refugee Women.)
Oh, yes, McCasland has somber issues on his mind. He deals with them forcibly during the time he brings on these contemporaries, some of whom never met. He gets around to Stein’s problem with Hellman. Stein resents Hellman’s depiction of lesbians in The Children’s Hour, although she doesn’t deny the truths in the play.
Indeed, it’s McCasland’s approach to Stein and Hellman—Stevenson holds an unlighted cigarette throughout—that’s his primary achievement. Toklas is a reticent person, who sees her life’s work as keeping Stein civil. Parker mostly drinks, but she does get several minutes to describe an abortion she had years before, one of the many incidents covered emphasizing that it’s a man’s world. Mary, eventually revealed as the triumphant psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner, and Bernadette remain intriguing characters. The only one who doesn’t quite register is Christie, whom McCasland shows as a rather waspish woman, an impression Christie hasn’t left over the years. She does, however, explain convincingly what she was up to during the highly publicized 11-day disappearance she made in 1926.
Of special Little Wars interest are the hints McCasland drops about Hellman’s writing. Fans who recall the controversial section about a spy called Julia in her memoir Pentimento will hear heated talk on the dicey subject. Also, Mary’s appearance and marriage to an Austrian resistance member certainly sounds like McCasland’s idea of where Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine inspiration germinated.
When, among other things, the #MeToo movement is surging and anti-Semitism is surging as well, Little Wars pungently focuses on several women who have absolutely no problem declaring me, too.
Little Wars was streamed starting February 1, 2021 and will remain online through February 14. Information and reservations: broadwayondemand.com
