There’s a surface cleverness running through playwright Caitlin Saylor Stephens’ Five Models in Ruins, 1981, a new drama set during a Vogue photo shoot in the fall just after the royal wedding of Charles and Diana. The concept for the shoot, which is taking place in a run-down stately home in Surrey with no working toilets and spotty electricity (and phone service), is to pose five models in Princess Diana’s rejected wedding gowns. The four models we meet initially offer an interesting study in contrasts, in terms of experience and fame if not height and prettiness. There’s Chrissy (Stella Everett), a star with five covers under her belt this year alone; Tatiana (Maia Novi), a Russian who’s a few years past her Chrissy-like prime; Alex (Britne Oldford), an up-and-comer with a year of college under her belt who shuns tabloids for more serious reading; and Grace (Sarah Marie Rodriguez), a wide-eyed newbie on her very first assignment.
It’s Grace whom the photographer, Roberta (Elizabeth Marvell), singles out for a quick lesson in setting up a shoot, manipulating the light and the props and the camera lens to achieve the atmospheric mood she desires. While we never see inside her lens, Afsoon Pajoufar’s elaborate set design and Cha See’s lighting help to conjure the effects Roberta is trying to achieve. (A tip of the chapeau to Vasilija Zivanic’s couture-worthy costumes.)
There’s much talk about Roberta’s status as one of the rare women in the field of fashion photography — and how her no-men-on-set, depicting-women-as-women ethos differs from the norm. Also, how she tends to push her models to the extreme in remote settings that are far, far from the usual comforts. “Those poor girls in Normandy just standing around in the freezing cold for hours on end,” Chrissy says of one of Roberta’s past projects, which Alex points out produced “beautiful” work. Leave it to Tatiana to interject a note of despair worthy of Dostoevsky: “At this point, they just payin’ us to age.”
Roberta’s unfashionable approach to shooting fashion creates some confusion. “Why would I be who I am, when I can be what I’m not?” Chrissy tells her. But Stephens doesn’t dwell on the point very long, instead producing some wonderfully bitchy overlapping dialogue that at its best punctures the absurdity of the fashion world. “There’s nothing worse than heartbreak,” Chrissy says at one point, until Tatiana follows with, “Except genocide.” The models swap horror stories about lecherous male photographers, binging and purging, and their sexual conquests (Chrissy’s include Basquiat, Koons, Roxy Music, “some girl named Madonna … both McNally Brothers… and a great many unknowns”). There’s also a throwaway mention of how all the top stylists are “all getting sick” — a cursory reference to the nascent AIDS crisis that’s just as easily dismissed to that Alex can complain about how “natural light is the fucking worst.”
While the cast delivers these lines at a rapid clip under Morgan Green’s direction, Five Models seems content to skim the surface of fashion-world satire without going either very deep or broad — or committing to whether it wants to be a drama or a comedy. One moment, Roberta is earnestly teaching Grace how to adjust the aperture of the lens to achieve a perfect balance between light and shadow. The next, Tatiana is revealing that a photographer raped her at age 14 and Alex describes a plane crash in the Brazilian rain forest that forced her “to survive off the condensation of airplane windows” until the shoot itself was canceled because of a local coup.
The problem is encapsulated in the confoundingly written role of Roberta, a woman who’s no less ambitious than her models as she struggles to establish herself in a male-dominated field. Despite decades of well-regarded work, we learn, she’s never shot a major magazine cover. Even setting up a crucial group shot — with the addition of a former model turned makeup artist (Madeline Wise) drafted back into service in front of the camera — Roberta’s vision literally seems to fail her. Marvell brings an opaque efficiency to her early scenes, when she convincingly captures an artist who spouts aphorisms (“I don’t do rock and roll”) to reinforce her mystique. But then her confidence — or perhaps Saylor’s — seems to fail her as the show teeters on wobbly stilettos toward grand gestures of meaning.
For some reason, Marvell’s pioneering photographer is turned into a simpering, lovesick mess by the final curtain — improbably smarting over the rejection over an ex-lover, a man of all things, and one whom we never even meet to fully comprehend the extent of his unworthiness. It’s a cruel, cruel fate for a character who seemed to float above such conventional, gender-branded concerns. And it undermines the effectiveness of Five Models as either an outrageous sendup or searing critique of the fashion world, past or present. ★★☆☆☆
FIVE MODELS IN RUINS, 1981
Clair Tow Theater at Lincoln Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 85 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 1 for $33