["Fen"] could well be called "Bottom Girls." As the author's "Top Girls" told of Marlene, a self-made businesswoman who sells out her provincial working-class roots and humanity for corporate success in London, so the new one examines the less privileged sisters such top girls leave behind….

As befits the shift in focus, the new play contains little of its predecessor's laughter: even as the audience enters …, it is swept up in a gloomy mist that pours out from the stage. "Fen" is dour, difficult and, unlike either "Top Girls" or "Cloud 9," never coy about its rather stridently doctrinaire socialism: it's the most stylistically consistent of Miss Churchill's plays and at times the most off-putting. It is also yet another confirmation that its author possesses one of the boldest theatrical imaginations to emerge in this decade….

As an impressionistic, class-conscious portrait of an agrarian community, the play recalls David...