Madeline Wise, Britne Oldford, Stella Everett, Maia Novi, and Sarah Marie Rodriguez in Five Models in Ruins, 1981. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

Five Models in Ruins, 1981, appropriately enough, looks fantastic. Afsoon Pajoufar’s set oozes crumbling grandeur, with its flaking murals, shrouded furniture, tendrils of mold snaking across paneled walls, majestic windows, and a hint of nature encroaching around the edges. Vasilija Zivanic’s costumes and Kyle Krueger’s makeup give us both character and moment: Photographer Roberta’s austere, crisp blacks. Makeup artist Sandy’s single blue glitter boot. Newbie model Grace’s prim neckline. Russian model Tatiana’s one-shoulder neckline and aggressive eye makeup. (She looks like a totally different person when Sandy redoes her makeup.) On-the-rise Chrissy’s fringed cowboy boots and on-the-decline Alex’s power suit. The wedding dresses—ostensibly Princess Diana’s rejects—that the models wear for Roberta’s shoot glow in Cha See’s lighting. Kathy Ruvuna’s sound design fills the scene transitions with edgy new wave tunes.

Perhaps again appropriately enough, Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s script feels like a series of snapshots, individual setups that don’t necessarily progress toward to one whole–or show a lot beneath the surface. The cast, under Morgan Green’s direction, has great chemistry and the scenes of models gone feral trying to out-bitch each other are sharply witty (if not always as screamingly funny as it feels like they ought to be). Stephens depicts the insularity and strangeness of the modeling world successfully, but the play ends up stranded between competing interests: spiraling into comic anarchy, building a feminist critique of modeling’s implicitly male gaze, and delving deeper into the characters’ emotions. Dabbling in all three, it doesn’t entirely satisfy in any. 

Roberta (Elizabeth Marvel)–one of two working women fashion photographers in 1981–is always hovering just at the edge of a real career breakthrough; it’s hard to tell whether her personal relationship with legendary Conde Nast artistic director Alexander Liberman is helping or hurting. She’s hoping to score a Vogue cover from this shoot that’s more like endurance camping: forty-eight hours in a decaying mansion in the remote British countryside with dodgy electricity, no running water, no assistants, and no food. (Models don’t eat anyway, fair enough, but the pathetic craft table contains nothing but Tab–admittedly a perfectly 1981 detail.) The makeup artist misses the van ride to the middle of nowhere, so the models are forced to do their own faces, with comically dire results. Roberta’s vision demands five models, but only four turn up, which sends Roberta into such a tizzy that she basically abandons everyone in the green room for the better part of the day while she waits for a callback from her editor in NY. (A callback she has to take covertly because she’s told the models there’s no phone, to the consternation of all but particularly Chrissy, whose anxiety at being unable to contact her agent feels like a precursor to 2020s panic when the WiFi cuts out.)

After introductions, Grace (Sarah Marie Rodriguez), wielding her naivete to ask the questions everyone else is too jaded to raise but happy to hear the answers to, inquires about the concept for the shoot. Finding out that Roberta wants to shoot the models as women–not girls, not sex kittens, not naughty, not flirty, not anything “the boys are shooting”–flabbergasts them all. “Why would I be who I am, when I can be what I’m not?” asks Chrissy. There’s a glint of inquiry here–but the first half is composed of scenes that end on button lines and bursts of New Wave as the models work on their looks, and we never delve deeper.

The rest of the first half of the play is basically the models vamping bitchily and killing time while Roberta sets up. There’s plenty of fun to be had here as Tatiana (Maia Novi), Chrissy (Stella Everett), and Alex (Britne Oldford) try to outdo each other with increasingly insane stories of their worst job ever, while the eager-to-learn Grace does test shots with Roberta on the other half of the set. Stephens and Green are juxtaposing tone in both writing and acting here, the four experienced models moving toward a pitch of ever-higher insanity and false facades stage right while Roberta and Grace have a quieter, subtler, more internally focused conversation on the meaning and technique of photography stage left. Even the lighting on Roberta and Grace is softer and warmer–but there’s not a whole lot that’s genuinely insightful or specific in that conversation, which makes it drag compared to the verbal catfighting among the models. 

Chrissy gleefully name-drops her long list of celebrity fucks and magazine covers (Everett nails the tone, poised between blasé and braggadocio). Tatiana leans more toward “been-there-done-that”; she knows her war stories and survivor’s grit can’t be topped by the others, and that edginess is her brand, one she’ll take far past the edge of plausibility. (Maia Novi’s delivery of Tatiana’s “worst job ever” story, which begins ludicrously and spirals out into cannibalism, just keeps getting better as it goes.) The fact that Alex is reading Kant in her downtime tells you most of what you need to know about her–she may have only done a semester of college, but she’s in touch with high culture and she’s got high standards, even if maintaining them is partly an excuse she uses to explain why her career never quite made it to the heights. Meanwhile, the wide eyed naif Grace, virginal as both a model and a human, takes it all in. It’s simultaneously completely over the top and so dry you almost miss the jokes; the ensemble meshes beautifully but the models are just killing time and they know it as much as we do. 

The arrival of Sandy (Madeline Wise) starts to pull everything together. Originally mistaken for the missing fifth model, she’s actually the missing hair and makeup person–though she’s a retired ex-model and will end up filling in because Roberta’s concept needs five. (When we get to the shoot, though, it never becomes entirely clear why Roberta needed five women, other than the fact that she has five dresses.) Beyond filling the gap in the shoot, Sandy is critical to the play. She has an emotional and narrative connection to Roberta that makes all the characters feel a touch more human. She has a tour de force of an entry monologue that raises the energy of the whole piece. Her retrospective relationship to modeling–the way her body’s changed since she stopped; the way she hasn’t quite left its orbit; the way she’s terrified and desperately eager to step back into the shoot–casts the attitudes of all the younger women into sharp relief. Wise brings her a lovely warmth paired with a hard-as-nails pragmatism. And the remarkable difference between the looks of the models when Sandy takes their hair and makeup in hand also says a lot about how they see themselves, what they do and don’t understand about how the camera sees them, and the way their glamour and chosen outfits are just as much fictional armor as the “looks” embodied by the wedding dresses.

We linger in the preamble to the shoot, but the shoot itself doesn’t get very far before it’s completely upended, cracking open all of the models, and Roberta, into a series of epically scaled emotional disclosures that build so far and so fast that’s it’s hard to tell if we’re meant to laugh or cry–especially true when they end in a shared primal wail that likewise lasts long enough to go from funny to tragic and back to funny. But in kicking the breakdown off by Roberta’s confession of heartbreak, and ending it with a last-minute catch of the perfect shot, Stephens and Green can’t resist the temptation to pretty up their ending both emotionally and narratively. Five Models in Ruins, 1981 is at its best when it leans into the ruin–anarchic, a little mean, swathed in excess. It’s too bad it tidies itself up before the end.