Review: Top Girls

Review: Top Girls | Theater Company of Lafayette | Lafayette, CO | Curtain Up! | Eric Fitzgerald

Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls—first staged in London in 1982—doesn’t show up on Colorado stages often, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s a sharp, shape‑shifting play: part surreal dinner party, part office comedy, part family reckoning. Theater Company of Lafayette embraces that challenge with real confidence. Under Brett Landis’s impressive direction, the production stays trained on the essentials—what ambition costs, who gets left behind, and how class keeps its grip. The show doesn’t sand down the play’s edges; it lets the tension sit, which is exactly where Top Girls works best.

Each act has its own function, and this staging makes that feel clean without overplaying the structure. Act I is the chaotic dinner party—funny, crowded, deliberately unruly—gathering women from across history to show how ambition has always carried a price and how even shared experience doesn’t guarantee connection. Act II moves into the Top Girls Employment Agency, where the pace tightens, and the play looks straight at the grind: the pressure to perform, compete, and project confidence when you’re running low. Act III delivers the blow. The scene between Marlene (Jo Niederhoff) and Joyce (Jaccie Serbus)  strips away the bravado and makes class the defining force—shaping their lives long before ambition entered the picture. It’s the act that says aloud what the others circle: success isn’t neutral, and someone always ends up carrying the weight.

Around Marlene, the ensemble’s multi‑role casting becomes an echo chamber, with certain characters standing out for how sharply they refract her story. Pope Joan (Elizabeth Kappes), from Act I, brings intellectual brilliance and the brutal consequences of stepping outside prescribed roles; she’s the dinner party’s most haunting reminder that ambition has always carried risk. Gret (Shelby Repaci), also in the first act, becomes the play’s raw physical metaphor for survival, unyielding, wordless, furious.

Angie (Shelby Repaci) lingers, awkward, hopeful, and heartbreakingly fragile, because she represents the fallout of Marlene’s choices more than anyone else. This future doesn’t fit into Marlene’s version of victory. Win (Cami Libouban-Gundersen) adds another perspective on ambition’s toll: quick, capable, and funny, but always putting on a version of themselves to stay afloat in a system that favors polish over vulnerability. And Mrs. Kidd (Daphne Moore), with her blunt insistence that Marlene step aside for her husband, reveals how deeply entitlement and gendered expectations persist. Collectively, they emphasize the play’s message that success is never solely personal; it’s built on pressures, sacrifices, and the people asked to carry them.

Jaccie Serbus brings a warm, authentic honesty to Joyce, grounding her as a woman shaped by responsibility, exhaustion, and a fierce, unfiltered love that never quite finds an easy outlet. Joyce bears the weight of her family history, the years of childcare, the financial struggles, and the compromises that felt less like choices than inevitability—and Serbus allows all of that to linger just beneath the surface. There’s toughness in her, along with humor and a vulnerability she refuses to sentimentalize, which makes the Act III confrontation hit with the force of something long suppressed and finally voiced. Serbus also channels this emotional intelligence into her portrayals of the other women—Isabella, with her grand, wandering memories in Act I; Louise, with her poised yet aching professionalism; and Shona, with her bold, bluffing confidence. Each character feels distinct yet connected, as if Serbus is exploring different facets of the same question about what women are asked to carry.

Daphne Moore matches that breadth with her own range, offering a steady, clear presence as Mrs. Kidd while also shifting into Kit’s restless curiosity, Griselda’s quiet endurance, and Jeanine’s eager‑to‑please anxiety.

Shelby Repaci gives Angie a quiet, disarming clarity—an openness that makes her longings, fears, and flashes of bravado land with real weight. She never pushes for sympathy; instead, she lets Angie’s contradictions sit plainly in the room, which makes the character’s final moments feel even more affecting.

Their work stands out, but it’s supported by an ensemble that brings generosity, detail, and quick‑changing precision to every corner of the play, giving Top Girls a world that feels fully inhabited from start to finish. Even with these standout performances, what ultimately resonates is how seamlessly the entire cast works together—each actor adding depth, texture, and heart, making the production feel not just well‑executed but deeply, collectively lived‑in.

Brett Landis’s direction provides Top Girls with a clear emotional throughline, guiding the production through its changing styles with a steady hand and a generous sense of humanity. The heightened theatricality of Act I, the brisk corporate rhythm of Act II, and the raw domestic honesty of Act III each feel distinct yet naturally connected, as if part of the same living ecosystem. Landis shapes pacing thoughtfully, allowing humor to flicker lightly, letting silence deepen, and giving the actors space to inhabit the contradictions Churchill weaves into every character. The result is a production that feels unified and compassionate, one that trusts its ensemble and invites the audience to sit with the play’s questions about ambition, class, and the cost of reinvention.

Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls remains a seminal work of modern theatre; a play whose experimental structure and political clarity continue to challenge artists more than four decades after its debut. Its fragmented format, overlapping dialogue, and sharp clashes between satire and realism demand precision, creativity, and real interpretive courage from any company that stages it. The challenge isn’t just technical, emotional, or ideological; it asks both performers and audiences to confront uncomfortable truths about ambition, class, and the toll of survival. That lasting complexity is exactly what has secured Top Girls’ place in the contemporary canon. When a production meets those demands, as this one does, it demonstrates how vibrant and provocative Churchill’s writing still is. It’s worth a trip to Lafayette to experience this Top Girls firsthand.