Jaclyn Backhaus’ “Wives,” which opened Sunday at East West Players’ David Henry Hwang Theater, examines the condition of women in four different eras: 16th century France, 1920 India, 1960s Idaho and present-day “Oxbridge,” an elite British university fictional hybrid. This isn’t an epic work but a compilation of comic sketches tied together with heavy thematic string.
I’m not sure that calling it a play is quite accurate. It’s really more of an outline for a theatrical work. Drama relies on discovery, and Backhaus has settled for a demonstration of prepackaged political points.
Time and again, the female characters, conditioned to be thrown into brutal competition with one another, find relief in solidarity. Wives and mistresses battle each other in the French court of King Henry II and in the palace of Maharaja Madho Singh II. Ernest Hemingway’s ex-wives and widow transform a liquor-fueled wake into a series of marital autopsies. Two students at the imagined Oxbridge University (borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”) bond at a newly formed essay writing space for witches.
The system is turned upside down when these women do the one thing the patriarchy never anticipates: band together in the realization that men aren’t the prize but the systemic problem. These vignettes — “scenes” would be giving too much credit — eventually drift into musical riffs or spoken-word rants.
“Wives” had its premiere at New York’s Playwrights Horizons in 2019, but there’s a reason you probably never heard anything about it. I was a little taken aback by the clumsiness of the comedy, which makes even “Saturday Night Live” of recent vintage seem like a work of genius.
Arasha in Jaclyn Backhaus’ play “Wives” at East West Players, co-produced with Hypokrit Live Arts.
(Daniel Antonio Vallejo)
East West Players and Hypokrit Live Arts co-produced this Southern California premiere of “Wives,” directed by Hypokrit co-founder and artistic director Arpita Mukherjee. The staging is elegant enough from a scenic point of view. But as soon as the cast is set in motion, the overriding impression is that of a manifesto springing into a college vaudeville.
Of the four-person ensemble, I was most intrigued by Rachna Khatau, the wild card of the group whose roles are the most slyly scheming and unpredictable. Arasha enjoys a few choice manipulative moves in her litany of parts, reversing situations that seem to have no obvious good outcome.
E.M. Davis alternates between cartoonishness and earnestness. Parvesh Cheena, the designated “man” in this company of “wives,” plays to the audience a bit too vociferously for laughs.
“Wives” shares some of the same impulses of Caryl Churchill’s brilliant, time-hopping feminist comedy “Top Girls,” but the comparison isn’t really a fair one. Churchill juxtaposes a surreal dinner party featuring famous women from literature, history and myth with a contemporary drama of two sisters who have made starkly different choices with their lives.
The conflicts are raw and unresolved, and Churchill forces theatergoers to make up their own minds about the characters’ furious dialect. Backhaus, by contrast, works it all out for her audience in terms that might be hopeful but lack theatrical cogency,
‘Wives’
Where: David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 Judge John Aiso St., L.A.
When: 7:30 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sundays, 7:30 pm. Mondays. Ends Nov. 1
Tickets: Start at $15
Contact: (213) 625-7000 or eastwestplayers.org
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes (no intermission)