‘Bull in a China Shop’ @ Amphibian Stage
Photos by Evan Michael Woods
—Jan Farrington
Playwright Bryna Turner’s Bull in a China Shop has a quality of essential joy that makes it hard at times to remember that these 19th/early 20th-century queer characters (mostly, anyway) are truly in the eye of a storm of social upheaval and anger.
“You want a revolution?” asks Jeannette Marks of Mary Woolley (circa 1899).
“I am a revolution,” Woolley flings back.
Revolutionaries, yes, but they were lovers as well, and more—partners for nearly 40 years, most of them at “stodgy” women’s college Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts (they changed the place)—and scholars, teachers, writers, activists, adventurers (sometimes in sync with each other’s next endeavors, sometimes not). Sounds like a solid (if tumultuous) two-career marriage, yes—though that was impossible at the time.
Director Kels Ervi (with an assist from co-director Emily Lopez and intimacy coordinator Anne Healy) brings Woolley (Emily Scott Banks) and Marks (Dani Nelson) to vibrant, urgent life at Amphibian Stage, adding lively, crushing-on-the-prof student Pearl (Mia Azuaje), sympathetic philosophy professor Felicity (Nicole Renee Johnson), and a worried college dean (Laurel Collins, fretting amusingly about the “concerns” of trustees and faculty). These happy few flesh out the show and broaden the conversations—giving a play based on letters exchanged by Marks and Woolley a more 3-D atmosphere.
And though the stakes of their social activism are high, Ervi doesn’t let us forget that Bull is a romantic comedy at heart: kisses and fights and reconciliations and infatuated teenagers lolling about—fun, all the way through, but full of emotions and ideas that make it all mean something.
Bull in a China Shop is played out on what looks like a supersized college library table—repurposed into a square, polished-wood stage by designer Leah Mazur, and backed by high stacks of filled bookshelves. A solid, traditional place that might intimidate most would-be change agents.
Music helps break up that solidity: the show’s wide and unexpected song list is bursting with strong beats and raucous or tender voices, from Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” to Bikini Girl’s “Rebel Girl,” “I’m the Only One” from Melissa Etheridge, and “Bury Me” from duendita.
The small cast doesn’t miss a beat, either: Banks and Nelson’s shining eyes and easy, loving body language; Banks’ tension as her position at Mount Holyoke complicates her life and thinking; Collin’s straight spine as the harried college dean; the upward glances of Azuaje’s Pearl, who believes Marks hung the moon. Lots of emotion in the air, at all times—with Ervi and crew keeping it both light-hearted and very touching.
A very enjoyable play, this one—and now, I want to hunt down the script for one of Bryna Turner’s earlier New York shows, At the Wedding, which sounds like a fun read (or would Ervi be interested in putting it onstage?). I can’t say Turner’s Bull script lets us know exactly how everything came out; but it’s enough that she’s given us a laugh- and emotion-filled introduction to Woolley and Marks (and the times!)…and a yen to know more.
Bull in a China Shop is a collaboration with Second Thought Theatre in Dallas, where the play will run later this year. So-called “co-pro’s” are a growing inter-city trend hereabouts, and Amphibian and Second Thought, both distinctive and sometimes edgy in their choices of shows, should be a fine fit if they decide to keep it up!
WHEN: February 11-March 1, 2026
WHERE: 120 South Main Street, Fort Worth
WEB: amphibianstage.com
