benevolent
In benevolent, Sophie McIntosh turns a basement laundry room into a small theater of female confinement, where the dirty linens of respectable New York become both literal evidence and metaphorical residue. Set in 1917 at the fictional Inwood Benevolent Home, a reformatory modeled on the city’s historical Magdalene institutions, the play places four young women on a “soiled shift,” scrubbing blood, excrement, and other unmentionable traces from the underwear of people who will never have to touch their own filth. McIntosh’s subject is grim—sexual exploitation, class privilege, racial inequality, pregnancy, institutional punishment—but her method is anything but dour. With Nina Goodheart’s richly calibrated direction, benevolent becomes a remarkably nimble comedy-drama about women discovering one another beneath the categories that society has imposed upon them. [more]