Zoë Geltman and Gabriel Brown in A Woman Among Women. Photo: Valerie Terranova

Julia May Jonas is in the midst of writing a five-play sequence called All Long True American Stories,  responding to five “white ‘male-experience’ plays of the American Western theatrical canon”: Arthur Miller’s ALL My Sons, Eugene O’Neill’s LONG Day’s Journey Into Night, Sam Shepard’s TRUE West, David Mamet’s AMERICAN Buffalo, and Edward Albee’s Zoo STORY.  A Woman Among Women, co-produced by the Bushwick Starr and New Georges as the inaugural show in the Starr’s new permanent space, reacts to All My Sons, though it’s less the plot that’s engaged here than the play’s ethical dimensions: legacy of fathers and sons; lies and their reverberations; the responsibilities and complexities that come with being a “bastion of the community.”

 As Susan Bernfield, artistic director of New Georges (who co-produced A Woman Among Women with the Bushwick Starr), describes it, Jonas’s enterprise involves “ ‘willfully/gleefully ignoring patriarchal restraints’ to take action and ideas from masculine ‘good plays’ and place them on feminine bodies.”

I’ve been reading Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? this week (apropos not only because of topic, but because of the echoes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, another American classic that could fall into that category), and Butler’s idea of how gender norms operate upon us struck me frequently as I was watching A Woman Among Women. Butler writes: “No one arrives in the world separate from the set of norms lying in wait for them….The norms that shape us do not act on us just once, but repeatedly over time….We live in historical time but also [it] lives in us as the historicity of whatever gendered form we assume as human creatures….Gender names the dilemma of how to conjoin social categories and lived forms of embodiment.”

How do those norms operate here? What social categories operate in a world defined as “among women”; what lived forms of embodiment come into play? In a very literal sense, Cleo (Dee Pelletier), the central figure here, lives in a world populated by women, most of them filling both the “conventional” social category of mother and also the elite professional roles that often belong to men: the doctors, the lawyers, the business operators. She’s a longtime widow with two grown daughters who shares her home with Tina (Maria-Christina Oliveras), a friend/platonic life partner who was formerly a caregiver for Cleo’s daughters. Her neighbors who fill the play (which takes place in Cleo’s backyard and on her porch) are a lawyer, Christine (Brittany K. Allen), and her wife, Tammy (Lucy Kaminsky), to one side and a doctor, Sarah (Hannah Heller) to the other; Sarah’s husband, Lane (Drew Lewis) is a stay-at-home dad, doing “women’s work.” The children we hear about and meet—neighbor girl Reeda (Annie Fang); Sarah and Lane’s daughter, Beatrix; Jo’s daughter, Frances; the two toddlers of a refugee family that Sarah and Lane are helping to resettle—are mostly daughters.  And the play nests within other woman-centric worlds as well: It’s set in Northampton, Massachusetts, home to the former Seven Sisters college Smith. One of Cleo’s daughters, Jo, is serving a long sentence in a women’s prison. The other, Grace (Zoë Geltman), works at the women’s health center run by her mother, as does Sarah.

Jonas says in a script note that the play is about mothers, daughters, and ideas of legacy, zeroing in specifically on Cleo’s daughters; if the traditional homily prescribes that the sins of the father are visited upon the son, here it’s the reverse: Cleo is burdened by sins belonging to both her troubled daughter Jo–with her history of addiction, mental health struggles, defiant behavior, and finally violence—and herself. Meanwhile, Grace, the “good girl” who explicitly fulfills her mother’s legacy by carrying on the work of her center, never feels loved enough. And one of the play’s central questions about autonomy and embodiment centers on Jo’s pregnancy: a pregnancy that may or may not have led to her going off psychiatric medications, a pregnancy she may or may not have kept if she hadn’t been arrested. We never meet Jo or Frances, but their physical absences are the black hole around which the action circles. Tina, Christine, and Tammy are working to get Jo’s sentence reconsidered, where Cleo feels vehemently that Jo’s actions had just consequences, an opinion shared by Jo’s estranged husband, Roy (Gabriel Brown), who is raising Frances with the help of his own mother.

Roy grew up in the house next door to Cleo’s, and his return home to clean out a storage space is the inciting incident for the action. (Even in a play among women, the “stranger comes to town” plot is kicked off by this man, though he does play the “eye candy” role so often assigned to ingenues—the women just can’t stop talking about how handsome Roy is.) When he left town, Roy was a skinny counterculture rebel with facial piercings and snake-eye contact lenses; now he’s a clean-cut single dad working in urban farming. And where before he was drawn to the mercurial, unstable Jo, now he and Grace are finding a new connection. (Even here, the absent Jo is a center of gravity; as far as Roy is concerned, their relationship was little more than a joke, but Grace can’t shake the phantom of her sister even as the chemistry between Geltman and Brown smolders.

The play is most successful simply in painting the bonds among and the social web that binds these women, looking at those social categories and how their roles as women feature within them: The responsibilities they take for one another and for their community. The specific struggles they face with addiction (Sarah) and self-worth (Grace) and the complexities of marriage (Christine/Tammy, and also Sarah, whose relationship with Lane is a shuttle between passion and contempt) and parenting. (Tammy, a stay-at-home parent, gets in one particularly pointed jab at the way fathers are fawned over for simply going out into the world with their children; we also see the ways the dynamics of parenting replicate themselves in marital relationships between the working parent and the stay-at-home parent.) And Brittany Vasta’s set primarily comprises a ring of lawn chairs set on Astroturf, which also serves as audience seating, bringing a portion of the audience into this community as well: while they are not expected to participate directly in the action, the actors frequently engage them looking for an affirmation or other response.

Sarah Hughes has directed her uniformly excellent ensemble with nuance and care that matches the subtle notes in Jonas’s characterizations. You feel the long history between Cleo and Tina in Pelletier and Oliveras’s every exchange; you learn an enormous amount about Tammy and Christine’s marriage simply from the tones of voice Allen uses when she’s annoyed versus when she’s trying to make up. Geltman, as she did in this summer’s Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda, has a gift for finding the funniest possible way to deliver a line while simultaneously socking you in the heart with its pathos. When Roy’s mother, Trisha (Fang), arrives later in the play, you can feel the way she is connected to but not woven into this world.

There are other elements to this play that I’m not sure I understood, or that seem stylistically shaggy, digressions into a slightly different play universe. The play, while not a musical per se, has its characters both break into song (the original music is by Brian Cavanagh-Strong) and play instruments on the periphery. Some of these songs shade into historical reenactments, sort of, as the actors put on bonnets and pick up instruments and dance in retelling an earlier moment in town history involving a family called the Johannesbergs, who all died of consumption. Also, Lane, a musician, at moments engages the audience more directly, getting us to participate in a rhythmic experiment where different sections of the audience mark different rhythms with our hands.

While both tonal shifts work to puncture the realist envelope, pulling the piece away from simply using the techniques of realist theater to tell a different story (though I would argue that the techniques of realist theater rarely successfully maintain that envelope themselves, but that’s an argument for another time), neither felt fully thought through, or seemed to integrate with the rest of the piece. Both felt like loose ends sticking out from a carefully woven fabric. Maybe that, in the end, is the point, but I found myself puzzled. Nonetheless, as I’ve come to expect with the Bushwick Starr and from New Georges, the thoughtful elegance of the production lifts the whole enough that I don’t really mind the loose ends. What sticks is the small, human details: The perfectly chosen shoes for every character in Wendy Yang’s costume design. The way Brittany K. Allen and Lucy Kaminsky share a look when they’re getting over a tiny argument. The exasperation with which Hannah Heller talks about Lane and Bea, which slips to reveal her fondness. And above all, Dee Pelletier’s Cleo, so certain in her own moral choices that she can’t even process contradictory information; Pelletier’s face shows every flicker of that resistance.