The Dignity Circle definitely isn’t one of those crazy multi-level marketing schemes. “It wouldn’t require much money or time — initially,” Angela (Sierra Marcks) tells Judith (Rebecca Pingree) in Lauren Smerkanich’s play of the same name. And does it matter how you categorize it when you can earn $40,000 and get showered in affirmations and affection from fellow women at a constant stream of champagne-filled parties?
The play, now in a Central Works world premiere directed by Gary Graves, is interested in the pervasive anxieties that make women in particular vulnerable to such late-stage capitalist predation. If you’re tired of feeling afraid, overwhelmed and broken all the time, if you’re on the verge of unloading all your worries on a near-stranger in the grocery store, being crowned a queen in the Dignity Circle offers “freedom,” as Angela puts it.
But what kind of freedom demands you make a pack of other women your marks?