At a glance Bryna Turner’s play “Bull in a China Shop” looks like a familiar type of story. A stubborn reformer takes charge of a stodgy institution and turns it around despite the opposition of entrenched traditionalists. But there’s something delightfully different about the comedy that Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company is currently giving its Bay Area premiere.
It’s the story of Mary Woolley, the staunch feminist who served as president of Mount Holyoke College from 1900 to 1937, steering the women’s college from a training ground for future wives to a competitive educational institution in its own right, steering women toward becoming whatever they bloody well wanted to be.
In fact the play doesn’t dwell much on whatever changes Woolley made. They’re alluded to every now and then, mostly in conversations with prim traditionalist Dean Welsh (played with perturbed restraint by Mia Tagano) voicing the displeasure of the school’s thinning donor base.
Mostly the story focuses on Woolley’s relationship with Jeannette Marks, her longtime lover who came with her to become an English lit professor at Mount Holyoke. There’s fantastic onstage chemistry between Stacy Ross’ swaggering, authoritative Woolley and Leontyne Mbele-Mbong’s wry and playful but tempestuous Marks that lends the audience an emotional investment in their romance as it’s continually tested by distance, discretion and the delicate balance between convictions and job security. How strongly to come out for suffrage is a particular point of tension.
Despite nods to the period In Ulises Alcala’s costumes and Nina Ball’s elegant set, Turner’s comedy is far from a period piece, practically bursting with pointedly anachronistic dialogue. Someone says “abso-(expletive)-lutely” early on, and one student gushes, “We’re really shipping you and President Woolley,” using a present-day fandom term for rooting for a romance between two particular people, often fictional characters. (That’s “ship” as in relationship.)
The aforementioned overly enthusiastic student, Pearl, is played by Jasmine Milan Williams with hilariously gushing fervor as she dotingly hangs on Marks’ every word. As Marks’ dormmate Felicity, Rebecca Schweitzer navigates her role as occasional go-between with endearingly amusing awkwardness.
Aurora’s new associate artistic director Dawn Monique Williams makes a strong directorial debut at the company with this nicely nuanced, fast-paced production full of fantastic performances.
The play isn’t just unshackled from its time in terms of the style and substance of the dialogue. It exudes a sort of timelessness despite its periodic references to specific world events.
It’s a bit of a surprise to find that nearly 40 years have passed in the course of the play, because while the characters mature in some of their attitudes, they do not age. The reasons for that storytelling choice aren’t entirely clear, but it’s surely not an accident that we keep returning to Marks lecturing on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
More sense of Woolley’s causes and achievements (and Marks’s as well) would be helpful at times, to add more context and resonance to the things the two say about each other and themselves. When they talk about their idealism or opportunism, we don’t have much basis on which to judge and pretty much have to take their word for it, unless we’ve done some outside research.
Still, Turner’s tendency to keep expository dialogue to a minimum helps keep the characters feeling vital and immediate and alive. And Woolley and Marks — or at least the versions of them we meet in this play — wouldn’t have it any other way.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘BULL IN A CHINA SHOP’
By Bryna Turner, presented by Aurora Theatre Company
Through: Dec. 15
Where: Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley
Running time: One hour and 20 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $35-$70; 510-843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org
