Top Girls
Marlene, a Thatcher-era career woman, hosts a dinner party with famous women from history and legend. Then Churchill pulls the rug out and shows what Marlene left behind. The first act is a dazzling theatrical conceit; the last act is a gutting family drama. Churchill asked whether female success under capitalism was anything more than women learning to behave like the worst men.
Churchill's overlapping-dialogue notation makes the famous dinner party nearly unreadable on the page; it needs actors talking over each other, and you are alone with slashes and brackets. The three acts connect by argument rather than story, the chronology runs backward without announcing itself, and the whole machine is bolted to Thatcher's Britain tightly enough to need footnotes now.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
