By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The bride’s dress costs $6,000.
The bridesmaids’ dresses look like they cost $69.99.
They are a profusion of purple drapery, topped by a hat that looks like a cake.
“Something about this dress makes me feel like Big Foot,” Mindy (Allie Sanders) says.
Mindy is one of the five bridesmaids who each wear this same monstrosity that gives the Alan Ball play its title, “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress.” Ball is better known as the creator of the TV series “Six Feet Under” and True Blood” and the screenwriter of the film “American Beauty.”
The comedy is on stage this weekend and next at the Oak Street Theatre. Showtimes are Friday, Sept. 16, and Saturday, Sept. 17, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 18 at 2 p.m. continuing Sept. 23 and Sept. 24, at 8 p.m. and Sept. 25 at 2 p.m.
The play is directed by Bridget Drew, who also sewed the dresses from a vintage, 1991 pattern.
The play takes place in the early 1990s upstairs from the childhood home of the bride and her younger sister Meredith (Elizabeth Coronado). This was her childhood room, and now having graduated from college she’s back as she tries to figure out what to do with her life. She proudly displays a Malcolm X poster on her wall. But this rebellious streak seems more a cover for her aimlessness.
Meredith is not at all pleased to be taking part in this lavish affair.
Also, enlisted as bridesmaids are the bride’s estranged friends Trisha (Hali Malecki), a free-spirited woman with a checkered love life to live up to, and Georgeanne (Tiffany Scarola) her old college roommate. Mindy is the groom’s older sister, an outspoken gay woman.
Rounding out the team is Frances (Anna Giller) a naïve, devote young woman, who as the younger cousin of the bride looked up to her cousins when she was growing up, though she’d never have participated in their high jinks. Now she’s afloat in the lives of these older women who do all the things she won’t do because, as she proclaims, “I’m a Christian.” They drink. They smoke pot. They curse. They’ve had sex, which in one instance led to an abortion.
Giller shows how her character’s shock is a thin veil over her much deeper curiosity. Toward the end she even lets a Jesus joke slip out.
All the women have issues and would much prefer hanging round together in Meredith’s room airing them out and exercising their sharp tongued wit.
Central to much of this girl talk is Tommy Valentine, a Lothario who has slept with or made a pass at all of them. He carried on with Georgeanne when they were in college and got her pregnant. Trapped in a loveless marriage she still longs for him – there’s Victoria’s Secret lingerie lying in wait for him under her bridesmaid dress.
Meredith has her own hidden history with this charming creep, and this revelation adds dark tones to the proceedings.
Valentine and the rest of the bridal party stay out of sight. We see them through the bridesmaids’ unsparingly sarcasm and ribald commentary. They watch the reception from above looking down from Meredith’s window. The guests and hosts are, as one says, “the bland leading the bland.”
Only one, Tripp (Ryan Albrecht), makes an appearance in the room in his pursuit of Trisha. He’s charming, as he struggles to show he’s not like all those other guys. His pitch, which Trisha has heard many times before, keeps confirming her cynicism. Their conversation about love and lust stitches the various threads of the play together. We end with the bridesmaids coming together, and posing for a photo – by a camera, this being set before the days of smart phones.
They’ve bonded over the course of day, and have come to appreciate each other. The audience will over the course of the 90-minute play also appreciate these women whose quirks and character can’t be hidden by uniformly ugly dresses.
