There are 13 scenes in Act I alone – 12 in Act II. Maudsley whose evil intentions are reminiscent of Snidely Whiplash John Paul Odle as Will Bennett, the well-intentioned brother of Tess Melissa Dunlap as fellow student Celia Willbound Tegan Cohen as sophisticate Carolyn Addison and Ilyana Rose-Dávila as Maeve Sullivan, a girl from a poor family who struggles to keep her spot at the school when summoned home to care for her orphaned brothers and sisters. Other notable performances are crafted by Robert Heinly as Dr. Both her comedic timing and her intensity are spot on, and she is tremendously engaging as the striving student whose character is flawed but brave, whose heart is broken but rallies in her ardent quest for education. Byrd is the glue that drives this play ever forward. Banks (splendidly portrayed by Paul Donahoe) for the men to explore their passions, the flirtatious Ralph Mayhew (Michael Townsend) gives a hilarious delivery of an Italian love poem to aspiring student Tess Moffat (Madeline Byrd). In the Little Theatre of Alexandria’s production, director Marzanne Claiborne pulls together a brilliant cast that really clicks, affording us a tightly woven production that encompasses both drama and relevance. Funny how assertiveness works to the women’s advantage. Treated as a curiosity, they are chaperoned, cosseted and degraded by the male students until they join forces in solidarity with the women’s movement to gain the right to vote. Under this aggressive male pressure, the ladies are subjugated at every turn. “Degrees for women are a dangerous idea,” Maudsley proposes. Maudsley espouses cock-eyed Victorian notions of women’s unsuitability to the rigors of higher learning, attributing hysteria to the female body – he calls it the “wandering womb” – the destruction of natural maternal instincts, their inability to land a future husband and other antiquated notions. Welsh is leading the charge to graduate a small but brilliant incoming class of young women of differing socio-economic backgrounds and fields of study. Maudsley, the renowned male psychiatrist. Jessica Swale’s play is based on the true story of Elizabeth Welsh, the mistress of Girton College, and Dr. No wonder the popularity of writers like Virginia Woolf and the Jazz Age hit the scene a mere two decades later, though it should be noted that King’s College in London had a “Ladies Department” in 1897 when Woolf attended. The term ‘blue stockings’ was a derogatory reference to a woman with literary or intellectual interests. “Blue Stockings” harkens back to the late 19th century at Cambridge University at a time when women wore bloomers and didn’t have the right to vote or earn graduate degrees from the college.
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