["Top Girls"] is no match for its predecessor ["Cloud 9"], but, happily, it is every bit as intent on breaking rules…. The actresses in the company keep popping up in new roles; the setting switches abruptly and at first inexplicably between London and a dreary working-class home in provincial Suffolk; the evening ends with a scene that predates the rest of the action by a year. Miss Churchill also makes abundant use of overlapping, intentionally indecipherable dialogue, Robert Altman-style, as well as of lengthy pauses and stage waits that would make any Pinter play seem as frantic as a Marx Brothers sketch by comparison.

One cannot be too thankful for all these brave gambles, the strangely compelling and somehow moving silences included. Miss Churchill sees the theater as an open frontier where lives can be burst apart and explored, rather than as a cage that flattens out experience and...