["Top Girls"] is no match for its predecessor ["Cloud 9"], but, happily, it is every bit as intent on breaking rules…. The actresses in the company keep popping up in new roles; the setting switches abruptly and at first inexplicably between London and a dreary working-class home in provincial Suffolk; the evening ends with a scene that predates the rest of the action by a year. Miss Churchill also makes abundant use of overlapping, intentionally indecipherable dialogue, Robert Altman-style, as well as of lengthy pauses and stage waits that would make any Pinter play seem as frantic as a Marx Brothers sketch by comparison.

One cannot be too thankful for all these brave gambles, the strangely compelling and somehow moving silences included. Miss Churchill sees the theater as an open frontier where lives can be burst apart and explored, rather than as a cage that flattens out experience and diminishes it. Because of the startling technique and several passages of dazzling writing, "Top Girls" is almost always fascinating, even when it is considerably less than involving.

Some of the play's slippage does occur, it's true, when Miss Churchill's experiments run on self-indulgently. It seems unduly perverse that almost every scene must trail off before ending. The fantasy prologue, fun as it may be, is seriously overlong; later on, the author has trouble resisting the urge to lecture. Yet the major difficulty in "Top Girls" is a matter of content, not form. To these male American ears, Miss Churchill's new statement about women and men seems far more simplistic and obvious than the fervent pansexuality of "Cloud 9."

The message announces itself in that first scene, which proves an almost anthropological search for the ties that bind history's strongest sisters. Like Marlene, the famous icons at her table are "top girls"—courageous women who have "come a long way" by accomplishing "extraordinary achievements." But they've all paid a price for success: They've sacrificed their personal lives and children, been abused by men and lost contact with women who did not become "top girls." And we soon learn that Marlene, the present-day inheritor of their hard struggles for independent womanhood, is worse off yet. In order to fight her way up from her backwater proletarian roots to the executive suite, she has become, figuratively speaking, a male oppressor….

No one can deny that women like Marlene exist. As Miss Churchill ultimately makes too clear, her heroine is partly a caricature of the ultimate British "top girl," Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But the playwright seems to beg her complicated issues by showing us only her monstrous heroine at one extreme, and, at the other, the victimized women that the Marlenes of this world exploit and betray. The absence of the middle range—of women who achieve without imitating power-crazed men and denying their own humanity—is an artificial polemical contrivance that cuts the play off at the heart. We're never quite convinced that women's choices are as limited and, in the play's final word, "frightening" as the stacked case of "Top Girls" suggests. Even in England, one assumes, not every woman must be either an iron maiden or a downtrodden serf.

Still, we're often carried along by the author's unpredictable stagecraft, her observant flashes of angry wit and pathos.