The Bachelors’ Tea Party by Kiran Rikhye (review)

For the thirty years (1892–1922) that lopsidedly bridged the Gilded Age and the Progressive era, two remarkable women lived together in New York near Gramercy Park, pursuing influential careers and hobnobbing with some of the city’s most visible artistic and social movers and shakers. Bessie Marbury was America’s first “play broker” (what we would now call an agent) and Elsie de Wolfe, after failing to find professional acceptance as an actress, became the country’s first interior decorator when she created the décor for architect Stanford White’s Colony Club—the first social club for women. The Bachelors’ Tea Party is a whimsical homage to this duo.

At first blush, the play is a charming bit of recuperative feminist history offered in a delightful, almost site-specific setting. Actresses Liz Eckert (Marbury) and Jody Flader (de Wolfe) hold court at an afternoon tea that is precisely that, onstage and off. Sixteen audience members share a private room in a nineteenth-century building located just across the street from where the women actually lived. The building, now repurposed as a bed and breakfast, also offers high tea in a cushioned, pampering set of private rooms with fireplaces, egg-and-dart molding, and panels of gold wallpaper bursting with pink peonies. Director Jon Stancato tucked the performance cozily into one of these salons. Here, the actresses entertain four important guests, while the audience sits cheek by jowl with the performers and is served a five-course tea. Whatever we don’t learn in the dialogue is filled in with program notes and a helpful post-show handout headed with the words “What happened to …?” Oh, and did I mention that the ladies’ four famous visitors are played by dolls? These are the china-headed variety that nowadays seem far too antique to be playthings, but that are perfect on beds, chairs, or mantelpieces in historic houses or museums. Accordingly, the piece includes playing—by which I don’t mean only acting in the usual sense. The rich use of effigies and ventriloquism both called to mind actual little girls creating scenarios with their dolls (“and then Barbie walks over to him and says …”) and the sense that corseted women in the days before the vote were themselves playthings. Yet, having the main characters provide the voices for the outsiders with the power to back or break our heroines suggested that artifice and girlishness can be the velvet glove adorning an iron fist.

Bachelors’ Tea Party comprises a prologue and three teas. The prologue lays out the stakes: making a hit in high society is not unlike having a creative career. In both realms, a woman needs to be original and independent, but not too much of either. At the first tea, Marbury and de Wolfe open their door to Anne Tracy Morgan (youngest daughter of John Pierpont and later a winner of the Légion d’honneur for her work with French civilian victims during World War I), and then to Beatrice de Mille (mother of Cecil B. and a theatrical agent and later Hollywood scenarist). The Anne and Beatrice dolls do not speak, but we know what they are saying as the actresses repeat remarks we are able to infer and respond to questions from the dolls. The actresses also feed the dolls/visitors imaginary cakes and tea from a doll-size tea service. The issue at hand is where and how women can do business, given that they are barred from the place where men of the time usually did theirs—at a club. Once the visitors depart, our heroines argue about de Wolfe’s nonstarter career; arriving at stalemate, following which Marbury sits reading a copy of works by Oscar Wilde, who was one of her international clients (Shaw, Feydeau, and Rostand were others).

In the second part of the play, the dolls have been re-costumed (in full view of the audience) as men, also getting Magic Marker...