In the printed text of Blue Stockings, the play is dedicated to Malala Yousafzi—the Pakistani teenage activist advocating education for women, who, in 2012, was wounded by armed assassins seeking to silence her. If that's not enough to illustrate women's long and hard-won struggle for academic parity, Jessica Swale's microcosmic account of how Cambridge University stonewalled on issuing degrees to its female scholars until 1948 (!) will make you a believer. Can I get a “you-go-girl"? The contention revolves around four lone STEM students at Cambridge's all-female Girton College in 1896, whose classes are conducted by volunteer lecturers at a location sufficiently remote from the main campus to require bicycles for traverse between study halls (necessitating the riders doffing their skirts for bloomers). The students must navigate male hostility, male attraction, families in need of domestic aides and stodgy professors declaring their species unfit for intellectual pursuits. Their teachers, by contrast, must navigate the controversies generated by the boisterous suffragette movement and veiled threats to their own careers in order to persuade the (exclusively male) school senate to even consider, let alone approve, universal certification upon completion of the required studies. You can put away your notebooks, however. Under Spencer Davis's direction, a cast of seasoned storefront-circuit regulars concentrate on the issues under scrutiny, while still attacking their roles with disciplined gusto and not a trace of caricature (though the palpably enthusiastic opening-night audience included one theater critic—not me—whose review expressed a longing to inflict violence on the speaker of a particularly virulent sexist diatribe).
