Sophie McIntosh’s benevolent depicts four young women living at the fictional Inwood Benevolent Home in 1917: from left, Emma (Mia Fowler), Margaret (Chani Reese), and Sarah (Rachel Ravel), with Abby (Livvy Marcus) in the background.
In Sophie McIntosh’s new play benevolent, four young women in 1917 New York endure life inside the Inwood Benevolent Home, an ostensibly charitable reformatory for “fallen girls.” More specifically, the work is set in the basement laundry room, where the women wash soiled sheets, toiling over basins with washboards and helpings of borax. McIntosh uses this setting to explore issues of class, gender, and desire, all rooted in the relationships among the four residents.
Emma isn’t interested in the wealthy Abby at first, but helps her out in a moment of need.
The production is presented by the Good Apples Collective, co-founded by McIntosh and Nina Goodheart, benevolent’s director. Goodheart’s assured direction expertly navigates the play’s stylistic shifts, from light comedy to romance to a much darker register.
Sarah (Rachel Ravel), a street performer from Coney Island, rooms with Abby (Livvy Marcus), a naïf who moves in very different circles from the other reformatory residents—a recent love interest of hers is a member of the Astor family, for example. Abby claims that an unchaperoned visit from a boy resulted in her reactionary father placing her in the home, and she is cultivating a friendship with the oft-mentioned but never-seen matron, hoping to be involved in the charity when her stint is over.
The believability of Abby’s presence in the reformatory hovers over the play and is never quite reckoned with, but it’s a device that allows McIntosh to examine class differences. Though there are moments of heavy exposition, most of their circumstances emerge during casual conversation and the day-to-day grind of the laundry.
Sarah is—in the eyes of society—morally dubious, but she has never sold herself; the same can’t be said of Margaret (Chani Reese) and Emma (Mia Fowler). When Emma’s seeming coldness is commented on by Abby, Sarah explains:
Sarah: That’s just Emma. Can’t blame her, considering.
Abby: Considering?
Sarah: Well, she’s spent a decade getting her card punched twenty, thirty times a day. Is it any wonder she’s all worn down?
Abby: Goodness. I didn’t realize she confides in you
Sarah: Oh, I don’t talk to her. I talk to Margaret. And she knows everything. She told me Emma’s had dozens of soliciting charges. Even more than Margaret has!
Margaret, self-consciously mischievous and irreverent (“a wicked girl,” the script notes), is able to earn more from her trade than Emma, who is Black and thus barred from working at a “ten-dollar house” and is resigned to a “fifty-cent joint.”
Sarah and Margaret’s romantic relationship begins under the guise of “practicing” techniques for the inexperienced Sarah’s benefit.
All this talk is surprising to Abby, and Marcus makes the most of her unworldliness through astonished facial expressions and exclamations when the conversation turns to earthy matters. She is a fish so out of water as to defy belief, but it makes for many humorous exchanges.
Sarah, Emma, and Margaret are too smart to buy into the rhetoric of moral rectitude, even if Emma is willing to play the game to escape a horrid life. When Margaret learns that Sarah is a virgin, they begin a dalliance under the guise of “practice” for boys, which quickly blossoms into something much more. It’s a lovely irony that in the claustrophobic, subterranean laundry room, a world of genuine desire opens up to them.
Incorporating reproductive rights and abortion practices of the era, the play explores the closeness that develops among the women, even where walls were once steadfastly erected—particularly the ones built, and then lowered, by the deeply scarred Emma. The question of loyalty across class and racial lines comes into play, echoing the hierarchy and complicity McIntosh examined among women in her 2022 acting-school play, Macbitches.
The entire play takes place in the basement laundry room of the Benevolent Home. Photographs by Nina Goodheart.
All technical aspects of the production are first-rate: Junran Shi’s detailed scenic design includes a Sisyphean laundry chute where new sheets always seem to arrive just when the workload begins to look more manageable; Paige Seber’s effective lighting design, which includes hanging lights that are part of the set; Saawan Tiwari’s apt period costumes; and Max Van’s haunting sound design, especially the cries and screams of women in labor coming from the floor above them.
McIntosh strikes an effective tonal balance, neither pretending as though the women are living in 2026 nor relying on too much archaic terminology. This allows the contemporary resonances to shine through without heavy-handedness. Benevolent is a powerful play, strikingly well directed, with turns and revelations that land forcefully, even if one can see them coming.
The women are sent to the Benevolent Home to be “reformed,” but benevolent is most interested in what cannot be disciplined out of them.
The Good Apples Collective production of benevolent runs at IATI Theater (64 E. 4th St.) through Sept. 5. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; there is also a matinee on Aug. 23 at 2 p.m. For information, visit goodapplescollective.com/benevolent.
Playwright: Sophie McIntosh
Director: Nina Goodheart
Scenic Design: Junran “Charlotte” Shi
Lighting Design: Paige Seber
Costume Design: Saawan Tiwari
Sound Design: Max Van
