Review: "benevolent" Sorts Through Some of the Dirty Laundry of America's Past

benevolent

Written by Sophie McIntosh

Directed by Nina Goodheart

Presented by Good Apples Collective at IATI Theater

64 East 4th Street, Manhattan, NYC

August 14-September 5, 2026

Chani Reese, Rachel Ravel, Livvy Marcus, and Mia Fowler. Photo by Nina Goodheart.

Forcing unruly women into the custody of institutions such as jails, asylums, workhouses, and laundries has historically been a popular mechanism of (patriarchal, capitalist) social control, and it remains, albeit in more circumscribed form, an available lever of power today (e.g., the continued criminalization of sex workers). benevolent, a new play from Sophie McIntosh, takes audiences inside one such institution, at a time when there were substantially more avenues to confinement within its walls. Directed by Nina Goodheart, co-founder with McIntosh of Good Apples Collective, the perfectly paced and fittingly claustrophobic benevolent unfolds entirely in the basement of the "Inwood Benevolent Home," a fictional composite of the historical Magdalen Benevolent Society (later Inwood House) and the House of Mercy (see "Inwood's Old Magdalen Asylum" and "History of the Inwood House of Mercy" for accounts of these institutions); and its focus on quartet of women confined there limns a set of highly individualized portraits that simultaneously act as a microcosm of sexuality as a site of women's subjugation in 1917 New York City.

Mia Fowler, Chani Reese, Livvy Marcus, and Rachel Ravel. Photo by Nina Goodheart.

The audience first meets Sarah (Rachel Ravel) and Abby (Livvy Marcus), consigned to the "soiled shift" in the reformatory's basement laundry, scrubbing away at begrimed whites with tubs and washboards. Sarah, sent to the home for busking on the Coney Island boardwalk, though more irreverent than Abby, does a lot more actual scrubbing than her younger companion, whose privileged background–she says that her father sent her to the home because she was unchaperoned with a wealthy suitor–seems to have left her with a bit of an allergy to manual labor. The two play a game, "blood or shit?," with the dirty linens (which also belong to the privileged classes) that foregrounds the bodily in a way quite opposed to the sanitized ideal of the Angel in the House inherited from the previous century (and arguably surviving in today's tradwife subculture). Later, they are joined by the level-headed Emma (Mia Fowler), at the reformatory because of soliciting charges and oddly protective of "her" box of Borax. Emma is suspected of spying for the Matron by Margaret (Chani Reese), the final character to arrive for the shift. Margaret is in the home for the same reason as Emma and is the most unrepentantly bold of the four women (just look at those striped stockings!)–although we see by the end of the play that even she, given the culture in which she lives, has limits. These limits are different for Emma, the only Black woman among the four. Expectations are upended as we learn more about how each of them came to be "fallen," and as a potential crisis gives way to a different, actual crisis, the women's choices reveal limits too to solidarity (benevolent, like other of McIntosh's plays, advocates for without idealizing women), underscoring the need to take an intersectional approach to gendered issues.

Rachel Ravel and Chani Reese. Photo by Nina Goodheart.

As a setting, the basement itself might suggest moving below the surface of these women and how they are seen, while the chute at the center of a set (designed by Junran "Charlotte" Shi) strewn with and bordered by pale fabrics that, unlike the women who wash them, are relatively easily purified, is not only the source of ever more labor but also, on occasion, of sound such as the distant screams (part of Max Van's sound design) of another "ruined" woman in labor. That we see the characters only in this location helps to align us with them, decreasing any sense of freedom and mobility. It is no accident that two mirroring scenes of the women helping one another to exercise bodily sovereignty, one producing pleasure and one pain, both carry a similar sense of danger. While the reformatory may deindividuate the women with its pink uniforms and white aprons (designed by Saawan Tiwari), another form of bodily control, the gripping, sensitive performances by the cast ensure that the audience experiences each woman as a distinct, layered person, as in Ravel and Reese's keenly felt portrayal of Sarah and Margaret's burgeoning intimacy, Fowler's moving unveiling of Emma's past trauma and future hopes, or Marcus's visceral rendering of the naive Abby's battle with both physical pain and internalized misogyny. In the world of benevolent, sisterhood seems inescapably veined with–but not overcome by–tragedy: perhaps, amidst increasing efforts to roll back women's bodily autonomy, a model of resilience for a post-Roe world.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards