From left: Grace (Sarah Marie Rodriguez), Chrissy (Stella Everett), Alex (Britne Oldford) and Tatiana (Maia Novi) brace for a storm in Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s comedy Five Models in Ruins, 1981.
The October 1981 issue of Vogue magazine features Nastassia Kinski on the cover and includes the infamous Richard Avedon two-page photo spread of the actress wearing nothing but a huge, writhing boa constrictor. But in the alternate reality of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s vitriolic new comedy, Five Models in Ruins, 1981, that October issue very nearly comes to feature a much lesser-known cover girl, and the accompanying story would showcase not a serpent, but five decidedly catty women in flowing white gowns.
The logistics of the play are a bit of a stretch. Set in the decaying rooms of an old estate in the English countryside (beautifully rendered by Afsoon Pajoufar), the models have been hired to wear dresses that Princess Diana had recently rejected for her royal wedding. The idea that American Vogue would expense a shoot better-suited to its British edition or that Vogue would risk such a dig at Britain’s royal family or that designers like Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent would be OK with their creations being identified in the pages of Vogue as rejects all seem unlikely. But details be damned—the playwright is much more concerned with the interior lives of her chaotic characters.
Sandy (Madeline Wise, left) confides in her photographer, Roberta (Elizabeth Marvel).
In a 2018 description of her work, Stephens says that she “writes plays about bad women—women who are lonely, alienated, objectified, and loveless.” And so it is with this new piece, featuring women who are all alike in their ambitions yet each unhappy in her own way. They all have beautiful skin and tough façades that ultimately fail to hold in the avalanche of emotional damage accumulated over careers that have been full of physical and psychological abuse, eating disorders and petty jealousies. Under the fluid direction of Morgan Green and showcasing a company of actors that support one another even when their characters do not, the concept of “posing” works double-duty here as both job requirement and coping mechanism.
“Details be damned—the playwright is much more concerned with the interior lives of her chaotic characters. ”
Chrissy (Stella Everett) is the most clueless of the bunch and also the most currently successful if measured by sheer number of magazine covers. Still, a thunderstorm will turn her into a weeping mess (“Weather makes me feel completely out of control.”). Alex (Britne Oldford) is the annoying know-it-all who reads Immanuel Kant in her off-time. Tatiana (Maia Novi) is the fading Russian beauty straight out of central casting, complete with cartoon accent. Grace (Sarah Marie Rodriguez) is the new girl on her first assignment, chewing gum to calm herself, having not yet graduated to chain smoking.
Sandy (Madeline Wise) is a former model turned makeup designer who has been pressed back into duty after a scheduled model fails to show up. And their photographer, Roberta (Elizabeth Marvel), serves as their rigid den mother. A temperamental and repressed soul who has survived as one of the very few female fashion photographers, she nonetheless has gone a quarter century without being rewarded a cover.
The first half of the play introduces the women and sets their boundaries amid a flurry of cigarettes, cans of Tab and brutal jokes:
Tatiana: I have abortion. Tuesday. Germany. They’re cheaper in Europe.
Chrissy: Like handbags!
Roberta (Marvel, left) helps Grace (Rodriguez) see the light. Photographs by Marc J. Franklin.
As the women undergo the transformative process of styling their hair and makeup for the shoot, they engage in name-checking the photographers they’ve slept with as a form of one-upmanship and play a game of who had the worst modeling assignment ever. Nominees include posing with dead bodies. Stephens’s writing shines here, at times comically poetic (“I’ve been squeezing my urethra since Heathrow,” says a full-bladdered Alex), at other times sage-like:
Tatiana: Your pores is like little container for incident that happen throughout your life. When you little, you do not notice them. … But older you get, incident accumulate over time. They build up. This why pore get so huge. They must contain every little incident you have survived.
Meanwhile, Grace, with no job history to share, volunteers to help Roberta set up her equipment in an adjoining room. This opens the door for some metaphorical chitchat over the importance of being slightly out of focus and the dangers of losing interesting shadows by being too much in the light.
The play’s latter scenes deal with the models coming physically together while Roberta falls emotionally apart, heartbroken over the end of an affair with a real-life Vogue legend, a romance that again rubs the wrong way against reality. In a risky conclusion, as the day goes from bad to worse, primal instincts kick in before ultimately resulting in a moment of beauty—not resolving the play’s narrative so much as capturing a frozen instant of truth, like a photograph.
Five Models in Ruins, 1981 runs through June 1 at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater (150 W. 65th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit lct.org.
Playwright: Caitlin Saylor Stephens
Direction: Morgan Green
Sets: Afsoon Pajoufar
Costumes: Vasilija Zivanic
Lighting: Cha See
Sound: Kathy Ruvuna
