The chick-flick concept isn’t dead. It’s just moved onstage. Allan Ball’s play, “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress,” presented at Lisner Downstage this past weekend by Forbidden Planet Productions, combines a witty script with an irreverent cast of disgruntled bridesmaids to create a classic example of girl-comedy. Set at a wedding reception in Knoxville, Ky.., each bridesmaid retreats to the same upstairs room in order to escape from overbearing mothers, lousy exes and the psychotically perfect bride. What follows is an amusing rendition of the plight of the modern woman.
The play, directed by Allison Hagan, does not chart any deep new territory. All of the bridesmaids, clad in sufficiently hideous magenta dresses, gripe about traditional women’s issues, ranging from trivial (makeup names, men) to serious (sexual abuse, men). It is the biting one-liners that keep the play’s material, for the most part, fresh and entertaining; for example, one character describes her husband as “the biggest piece of wet toast I ever saw.”
The dialogue rapidly moves from comical to somber and back again, devoid of any unnecessary reflection: it’s as if the characters realize that these topics are over discussed, and consequently address them only superficially. Also, any conflicts in the play are resolved extraordinarily quickly; a fierce argument over religious beliefs, for instance, is fixed with a smile and a makeover. Apparently Mr. Ball didn’t want to trouble the audience with a lot of human drama.
The bridesmaids are a mix of archetypal and more original women characters. They include Frances, whose fundamentalist leanings are surpassed only by her naivet?; Meredith, the bride’s overtly rebellious younger sister; Trisha, the token jaded temptress; Mindy, the cheerful lesbian sister of the groom; and Georgeanne, a wonderfully crazy nervous wreck with a weight problem. All have issues with men, romantic or otherwise, and this serves as the common link among them – well, that and the fact that they’ve been forced to wear such ugly dresses. They achieve moments of sister-like bonding, but they don’t all become instant friends. Although all the bridesmaids are quite enjoyable, Lauren-Joy Goss is the only one that doesn’t take her character, Mindy, at face value: she is not concerned with fitting a stereotype, but rather with presenting a complete person.
There is one lone male in the cast: Tripp, Trisha’s love interest. He is a hurried addition to the play, thrown in at the end of the second act. His scene with Tricia is long and drawn out, a boring attempt to concede the point that all men are not “wet toast.” In fact, the play as a whole does get a little tedious by the end, perhaps because there is no intermission.
Nevertheless, “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress” is a lighthearted, entertaining play. Its bedroom setting is a perfect match for Lisner Downstage’s cozy setup. The play does not offer anything that’s edgy or new, but for those who just love simple laughs and good old man-bashing, it’s a pleasant two hours.
