Lexicographer Orin Hargraves estimated in 2017 that “the world of English lexicography” is populated by “no more than 100 people.” In the parallel world of Jacqueline Bircher’s play Webster’s Bitch, finishing a sold-out run this week in the New Haven Theater Company’s black box at EBM & Civvies Vintage, we meet four of them: dictionary authors Gwen (Abby Klein) and Nick (Gavin Whelan) and, later, editors Joyce (Lillian Garcia) and Frank (Ralph Buonocore). We also meet Ellie (Lisa DeAngelis), uptight Gwen’s unbridled sister, who’s visiting the office and, she hopes, a margarita bar before heading to Nepal for a year.
If Gwen and Ellie are reading from different scripts, Gwen and Nick should be on the same page. They hold the same title in the same small office of Webster’s Dictionary, a fictional analog of Merriam-Webster. They’re two of the only people in the world who do what they do. And yet, sitting a few yards apart for years, they’ve stayed at arm’s length and never had much to talk about.
That changes when Ellie notices a Twitter storm on the horizon. Gwen and Nick’s top boss, editor-in-chief Frank, has been caught on a hot mic at a public event using a bad word: “bitch.” What makes it bad is the way he’s used it: to describe Joyce, the senior editor at Webster’s and Frank’s direct report. As we discover, Joyce is not only a world-class lexicographer and scholar but also a loyal subordinate who does most of the dirty work, willing to be the face of tough or unpopular decisions she didn’t even make. It’s possible Frank once resembled Joyce, but now, after many years at the top, he seems as much a schmoozer and a figurehead as a lexicographer, fatted on the thrill of being the important person who’s invited to appear at prestigious events. A compulsive craving for attention and adulation could explain why Frank, during the hot-mic moment, would risk his wider reputation and close relationships for the measly reward of a pity laugh from a rival lexicographer.
You could say Webster’s Bitch, co-directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson, is about choosing words carefully, so its blunt title feels like an undersell of the play’s more sophisticated provocations. An early debate between a worried Gwen and nervous Nick, who feel like the first and second leads of the play, introduces us layfolk to a bit of philosophy of lexicography. The exchange begins when prescriptivist Gwen, who moonlights as Webster’s unpaid social media manager, expresses dismay at their dictionary’s current definition of “bitch,” where sense 3A, “an aggressive, promiscuous or overbearing woman,” and sense 3B, “any woman,” strike her as “inaccurate” and “lazy” and, for another matter, likely to incur digital feminist wrath. Nick, who wrote the definition—a revelation that further agitates Gwen, who thinks a woman should be the one to define a term primarily associated with women—defends his work and his fitness to do it, arguing, among other things, for a descriptivist lexicographical approach that defers to how a word is actually used rather than personal beliefs about how it ought to be used.
It turns out a modest office of lexicographers is a ripe setting for a play, as playwrights, too, spend most of their time thinking about words and meaning. But I think I most enjoyed one of the final scenes, where something that could happen anywhere takes place: Gwen and Nick, all but silent for years, are starting to like each other as friends, and finally using their words to make it so.
Written by Dan Mims. Images photographed by Deena Nicol-Blifford, NHTC Company Member, and provided courtesy of the New Haven Theater Company. Image 1 features Abby Klein and Lisa DeAngelis. Image 2 features Ralph Buonocore and Lillian Garcia. Image 3 features Gavin Whelan.
