'Hungry Women' Off-Broadway review — what would happen in a world without men?

Read our review of Hungry Women, a new play written by Melissa Maney and starring Tony Award nominee Julia Lester at SoHo Playhouse through August 30.

Summary

• Hungry Women is set in a world where men have gone extinct and follows three generations of women as they shape that world
• The show compellingly blends sci-fi with comic melodrama and features strong performances by Julia Lester and Sophie Zmorrod
• The show is recommended for fans of recent hit plays like John Proctor Is the Villain and Dad Don't Read This and feminist sci-fi novels like Herland and I Who Have Never Known Men

A world without men: It's a ripe setting of science fiction. A dream or a nightmare, depending who you ask. A logistical problem waiting to be solved by women eager to build a new society. Melissa Maney’s play Hungry Women, now running at SoHo Playhouse, explores a trio of scenarios across generations, from the initial male disappearance to a woman-designed system of subjugation. Though the piece is still finding its footing, Hungry Women’s potential is as unlimited as the playwright’s imagination.

Hungry Women’s first sequence, set in the 1890s, is a tad simplistic, but Maney’s tongue-in-cheek tone and Daniella Caggiano’s melodrama-inspired direction prove a winning combination. (Bathing every moment of direct address in a follow spot grew tiresome, however, especially as the cast regularly missed their marks.) Not explaining the initial mystery of the downed men only makes the story more intriguing as it flashes forward to the future. A comedy about the perils of patriarchy may be entertaining enough, but actually exploring a world without men, staring down the sci-fi and building a world anew? That’s a hook that sets Maney’s work apart from similar stories of repression and revenge.

Maney showcases four actresses as 12 fleshed-out characters who each stake their own claim in the world of the play while still echoing the fears and hopes of their past selves. The performances of these characters, however, are uneven, with Julia Lester and Sophie Zmorrod carrying the show. Zmorrod is a dynamic presence who takes charge of each conversation she enters, while Lester shapeshifts from role to role as if her costume changes are magic tricks. She is particularly astute as the schoolteacher Rebecca, a self-deprecating matron clutching at control of an “AP Herstory” class.

The narrative ingenuity of Hungry Women is owed in part to its development with SoHo Playhouse’s Lighthouse Series, a competition for new-work snippets where audiences vote on which ones will continue. Maney's play won last year’s contest, and such incremental staging perhaps allowed her the freedom to examine each century of Hungry Women with fresh eyes, building a world that feels, for the most part, intentional in its specificity.

The final third of the play chips away at its sense of authority, however, just as the authoritarian characters lose their grip on the society they’ve built. The whole conceit of the play is to ask what if: What if there were no men, what if we erased the history of men’s contributions to society, what if women could govern themselves? Maney fixates on reproduction, which women are initially drafted into by a sort of lottery (various sci-fi stories have posited that women could conceive using bone marrow and eggs in the absence of sperm). By the year 2091, women have recreated their own oppression through a strict system of Working Women and Housewives, allowing for choice but no flexibility once that choice is made.

The notion is, like the discussions at the beginning of the play, a bit simplistic; we all know women can advance anti-feminist agendas, if such a term exists in Hungry Women’s world. A third-act mystery threatens the world order, but it isn’t really explained. After this much world-building, throwing out any further exploration in service of an unsatisfying fight sequence and rushed conclusion feels unfair. While the mystery of the first part fits its heightened, soap-operatic tone, Hungry Women’s ending feels more like Maney couldn’t think of answers to her own questions.

Hungry Women summary

Hungry Women unfolds in three parts over the course of 200 years, starting in 1891, when all the men in Massachusetts have seemingly dropped dead and the surviving women are staring down a famine. In 1991, a class of high school girls has lived in an all-female world for a century, and they wonder why they aren’t allowed to learn more about the men who used to roam their now-borderless world. Finally, by 2091, society has strictly designated Working Women and Housewives, but one woman seeks to change the world order.

What to expect at Hungry Women

Hungry Women runs approximately 90 minutes with no intermission. The first sequence of Hungry Women takes a more melodramatic tone, with frequent use of a follow spotlight and farcical period language. In the subsequent two sequences, Hungry Women is more of a science fiction piece that exposes the blurry overlap of utopia and dystopia.

The play features multiple sequences of loud music as well as discussions of misogyny, sexual assault and other forms of violence against women, pregnancy, abortion, death, cannibalism, and starvation. Hungry Women also features staged violence, including depictions of rape and the use of prop weapons.

What audiences are saying about Hungry Women

Hungry Women has received positive responses from theatregoers on social media and the theatre review app Mezzanine.

• Mezzanine user JT calls Hungry Women “unfathomably brilliant” and “truly one-of-a-kind.”
• Instagram user Vincent Frye says the cast does an “awesome job” and that he traveled from North Carolina to see the Off-Broadway show.
• On Instagram, theatre enthusiasts The BroadGAYS call Maney’s play “weird, smart, twisted theatre.”

Who should see Hungry Women

• Theatre has swung big on the trend of angry young women dancing to pop music onstage, from John Proctor is the Villain to Dad Don’t Read This. Hungry Women is no exception, and fans of those othet teen-girl shows will enjoy the two sequences of its characters cavorting to Bikini Kill and the Nova Twins while transitioning from one century of feminine utopia to the next.
• If you enjoyed Julia Lester’s performance in last season’s Queens at Manhattan Theatre Club, you’ll love watching her three varied characters vie for control in Hungry Women.
• Fans of feminist science fiction will be hooked by the play’s series of what-if scenarios forged in the spirit of the novels Herland and I Who Have Never Known Men.

Learn more about Hungry Women off Broadway

Like costume designer Olivia Vaughn Hern’s corsets, Hungry Women has good bones. Lester’s performance is worth both the ticket and above-title billing; her command of character proves her star-power status.

Learn more about Hungry Women on New York Theatre Guide. Hungry Women is at SoHo Playhouse through August 30.

Photo credit: Hungry Women off Broadway. (Photos by Rebecca J. Michelson)