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The Women (by Clare Boothe; Max Gordon, producer) is calculated to give the Men two of the most shockingly informative hours of their lives and is so clever that few women would willingly miss it. Its cast of 35 is entirely feminine and its subject is exactly what its title suggests. Halfway through scene i, Playwright Boothe makes a distinction between Women and Females. Mary Haines (Margalo Gillmore), a gracious and home-loving blonde with one husband, two children and a heart filled with anxiety about reaching the shady side of 30, is a woman. Most of the rest of The Women are females, belonging to Manhattan's restaurant and rotogravure set. Disclosed in bathrooms, ladies' rooms, beauty parlors and maternity wards, safe from the eyes and ears of their menfolk, they talk, as men never hear them, about clothes, nail polish, money ("a woman's best protection is a little money of her own"), sex ("I'm just a frozen asset," says the play's lone virgin), nursing babies ("ouch! he's got jaws like a dinosaur").
When Mary Haines discovers through gossipy friends that her husband has become involved with a perfume salesgirl, her sage mother advises her to ignore the whole matter (as she did 30 years before) and keep her husband and her home at the cost of her pride. But the gossipy friends push Mary remorselessly along the Reno trail with all its bitterness.
No. 1 gossip is Sylvia (Ilka Chase), a gabby troublemaker who has her children by Caesarean section, preserves her bosom with applications of icewater and camphor, cheats on her husband and lands in Reno. About half the more prominent members of The Women's, dramatis personae land there with her in Act II. There they meet an indelible character named the Countess de Lage (Margaret Douglass). The Countess has married three fortune-hunters and a Reno cowhand, and she still puts her faith in "l'Amour." Mary Haines, hoping until the last that her husband will call her back, succeeds in sending home the youngest of the Women (Adrienne Marsden) without a divorce. Mary herself is doomed to two bitter years as a divorcee before her chance comes in a laudably natural denouement to turn the tables on the second Mrs. Haines and get back her man, this time for keeps.
Much of the play is brash and bitter. Much of it is moving—notably the scene wherein Mary tries to explain to her little daughter (Charita Bauer) how it is that Mother and Daddy can fall out of love. All of the play has sharp theatrical impact. A vast improvement on the form shown last year in her melodrama Abide With Me, Clare Boothe's The Women was received by first audiences with grateful mirth. Clever of line and deft of pace, The Women is packed with cracks which will doubtless be batted back & forth across Manhattan dinner tables the rest of the season. Samples:
"Why is it that in a taxicab every man behaves like Harpo Marx?"
"Watercress! It's like eating your way across a lawn."