The Oldest Profession

Publish date: 2024-07-09

The Signature Theater Company kicks off its season dedicated to the plays of Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel with a distinctly minor early work, given dignity and dimension by five endearing actresses. Part cryptofeminist sitcom — think “The Golden Girls” if written by Germaine Greer and Kate Millett — part poignant drama about the economic realities of aging women in a phallocentric world, part Lifetime movie and, finally, part afterlife musical, the fragile play improves as it shifts into an increasingly melancholy register. While it lacks the weight of Vogel’s later, better-known works, “The Oldest Profession” is an absorbing, compassionate vignette from Reagan-era America.

Starting one week before the presidential elections that brought Ronald Reagan to the White House and concluding four years later, toward the end of his first term, the play concerns five post-menopausal prostitutes plying their trade in New York City to a dwindling clientele of geriatric johns.

Dealing with increased market competition, rising rents, failing mental faculties and deteriorating stamina — theirs’ and their customers’ — the hoary hookers pass the baton of power from one to the next in a doleful relay as they succumb in turn to the pressures of the Life.

Vogel sketches the five-member service industry with warmth and wit, clocking the changes rendered in each character as she graduates from worker to management. The position of madam initially belongs to Mae (Katherine Helmond), whose prim appearance hides a fiercely protective attitude toward the girls, all of whom worked with her in a Storyville brothel in New Orleans before migrating to Manhattan.

The group is comprised of daffy, sweet-natured Vera (Marylouise Burke); brassy Edna (Priscilla Lopez); bossy pragmatist Ursula (Joyce Van Patten); and showbiz-obsessed Lillian (Carlin Glynn), who has preserved her looks more than her comrades.

The women tease and caress each other as they ponder ways to keep their depleted bank balance above zero. Early on, they bemoan the “whore Diaspora” that’s part of mayor’s election-year cleanup. As times get tougher, they look for increasingly desperate ways to boost their clientele — tapping the “Harold and Maude” kink market, plundering the AARP mailing list, scouting grief counseling groups or consoling mourners at the funeral of Lillian, who’s the first to go.

As each of the women expires she sheds her outer garments, revealing vampy bordello-wear underneath, and launches into a bawdy, innuendo-laden number of the kind sung by Mae West or Sophie Tucker. The ghosts then drift to the back of the stage, where set designer Narelle Sissons’ graffiti-splattered wall revolves to reveal the plush red velvet of a Basin Street brothel, complete with piano player (Randall Eng).

The dividing wall relegates the departed women to semi-visibility on the margins of the stage. The dual-set device works best when the ghosts interact during subsequent musical numbers — Glynn on drums and Helmond on trombone at one point — but a more open stage design that allowed their watchful eyes to remain on the survivors might have heightened the effectiveness of this bridge between the living and the dead.

Play doesn’t add up to an awful lot, but Vogel’s chief interest is the changing dynamic within a small group as fear of aging, death and financial insecurity push the women’s behavior in irrational directions, not to mention the need to feel “skin to skin” as something other than a transaction. The playwright wryly treats the hooker trade as a small business that fits the dream of success like any other (“This is America … where any girl can start in the alley and end up a madam.”) In addition to commenting on the depreciating currency of women’s bodies, Vogel acknowledges the increase in poverty and homelessness during a political period that created as many down-and-outs as it did billionaires.

Director David Esbjornson elevates the material by drawing warm, engaging perfs from the entire quintet. Helmond’s Mae charts a tragic trajectory from take-charge composure to terrified feeble-mindedness; Glynn brings a dreamy glamour and dry humor to Lillian; and Van Patten makes Ursula a flinty, abrasive type who maintains her loyalty to the group despite low reserves of patience for them. Lopez (who stepped in late when Anita Gillette dropped out of the role) is perhaps too young to be a contemporary of the other gals, but she wraps herself around good-time Edna with brio and socks across her number, “Sugar in My Bowl,” the show’s musical highlight.

Standout cast member, however, is the marvelous Burke, who invests slightly befuddled, tirelessly optimistic Vera with enormous heart. Her outcome, more than the others, gives this rather slight play some depth and a moving final act.

Elizabeth Hope Clancy’s costumes amusingly nail each woman’s personality, from Mae’s houndstooth Miss Marple cape and pillbox hat to Ursula’s no-nonsense starchy overcoat, Edna’s mixed animal prints, Lillian’s vintage-chic suit and Vera’s cheesy fur and girlish floral handbag.