Review of Woman School at Vintage Theater Collective

Once upon a time I went to a show and it was called Woman School.  Woman School is about a young man named Arnolphe (Adam Soule) that thinks women are untrustworthy, but he wants to get married.  So he makes this thing called Woman School where they teach the women only singing, how to cook, and how to knit.  Then he sends all these women to it, and then he has to choose a wife.   I remember from the beginning Arnolphe says smart women run away from you in the night, but dumb women wouldn't do such a thing, he thinks. But that is not true.  I know a lot of smart women, and none of them run away in the night.  His plan is destroyed when he finds out that his friend's son Horace (Ben Gansky) is actually going to get married to the woman that he is in love with.  Her name is Agnes (Kelley Ristow).

One of my favorite scenes was the scene where the servants (Caitlin Costello and Emily Shain) get their "clubs" (also known as baguettes, which are not as useful as clubs) and then they go to the doors and open them and close them in Horace's face and sometimes close it even on his finger.  And then he grabs a rope and climbs up to the balcony.  I tilted my head so it looked like he was climbing a wall because he was actually just walking along the floor and he was holding on to a rope. Horace when he was going up he did like some action music like da de lah dah dah de dahdah.  Like that kind if music. Then the servants punch him and cut the rope and he falls down.  Then they hit him with baguettes.  He tells them to stop, fixes his hair, but then tells them to go on and they keep going.  I thought that was really funny.

Another of my favorite scenes is the scene where the servants are talking about what it feels like to have your heart broken.  Arnolphe wants to have Agnes for his own, but the servants don't understand it at all.  They think he thinks she's like a big pizza, but that is not true. Not exactly. They said he thinks it is like having a big pizza, but then another eater comes, and then the pizza is gone.  I liked this scene because it is a funny thing that they thought of her like a pizza.

A scene that is very important to the play is the scene where Horace is talking to Arnolphe about the person that he is so in love with because that is when you find out that Horace is in love with Agnes.  Horace was talking about his love and how much he needed money for this girl.  Then he said her name was Agnes and got Arnolphe very very angry.  When he is angry he always says "I feel a little ill, and I need to go take some pills."  And then when Horace leaves him alone Arnolphe says something like "Ooooh. I do not like that guy."  This happens 3 times, and Horace keeps hugging him and chest bumping him and then Arnolphe keeps getting hurt on some part of his body.  Usually his bottom.  It was funny how Horace kept chest bumping him and hugging him and carrying him around the room and singing his lines.

In this part of the play, Agnes is talking to Arnolphe.  And she is telling him that this man came along and kissed her hands and her wrists and her elbows--all around her arms.  And Arnolphe asks, "did he kiss any other part of your body?"  And then she says, "Do they do that?" And I thought that was really really funny because she doesn't even know that men sometimes kiss women's lips. It's funny because she has gone to this place called Woman School which makes her stupid because she only knows how to do a few things that are not very useful in a life. She is real smart in the end because she forgot about Woman School and decided to make herself smart again. You can tell how she is smart because she says, "That woman school thing, I did not like that." I am glad there is no such a thing as woman school because I never want to go there.

They rhymed a lot of things in this play.  I thought it was just interesting how they rhymed everything.  It was kind of like Midsummer Night's Dream, how Puck rhymes everything. It seemed like they were old fashioned, but they also kind of seemed like they were from our time.  They chose the words that meant the same thing as they did in old fashioned language but they sounded like you would say them.  They sounded like it was right now because they used words that we use now.  None of the characters were French French. None of them had a French accent.  I could tell it was a French play because of their names and the writer's name was Moliere.  

You shouldn't treat women like you own their bodies. You should treat women like they are like you. Sometimes people treat women like they are servants, and they are not very nice to them and slap them and spank them and stuff. Some characters (Horace and Agnes) think what I think and other characters (Arnolphe) don't. I think Moliere thought what I thought. Why would the moral of the story be to treat women nicely and not like they are not parts of the world if he didn't think that that was true? People who would like this show are people that like Moliere, rhymes, slapstick comedy, and funny wigs.