The Oldest Profession, the ACT 2 Theatre Company’s first show of the season, takes place in 1980 just before the presidential election that put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
This is what the playwright, Paula Vogel, has described as a pattern play. The structure of the play moves the story as told through the experiences of five over-the-hill hookers as they make their way through the six scenes of the show.
The group got their start in New Orleans many years before, but they’ve grown old together in New York. And now their livelihood is threatened by younger, more scantily clad competition. Their clientele of “regulars” is aging along with them. Each scene opens on a park bench somewhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As the story unfolds and their clientele start disappearing, so do they. One by one. But not without a song to entertain us on their way.
The economics of the time are not kind, but retirement is not an option. Their stories will sound familiar, though the way the characters express them tends to lean on the blunt side. After all, these women have been “living the life” for a long time. Without being at all salacious, they don’t sugar coat the world they live—and leave us—in.
Vogel won a Tony and a Pulitzer for her previous work, How I Learned To Drive, in which she addressed the serious subject of pedophila. She also received acclaim for her play, The Baltimore Waltz, about AIDS in the 1980s. In The Oldest Profession she’s deals with hard economic times. Though it didn’t win a Tony it is, nonetheless, an exquisitely written piece about friendship, food, and compassion with a little music to ease the struggle.