salad
Strung between two columns holding up the lobby of Woolly Mammoth Theatre was a clothesline with three sets of reflective papers attached. Each separate set had a question written above it. On the papers connected below, the ones that looked like small mirrors, people who had come to the Washington theater to see its latest offering, Women Laughing Alone with Salad, could write down their responses.
Is there something you would change about your appearance?
“Stubby thumbs,” someone said. “I hate my feet,” another read. “The perpetual muffin top,” wrote a third.
Who or what has shaped your ideas of physical beauty?
“Magazines.” “Beyoncé.” “My mother.”
What do you love most about your appearance?
“My posture.” “My brown skin.” “My happy trail.”
The questions represented what would be the themes of the night, one that ended with a standing ovation for the world premiere of Sheila Callaghan’s play. The Woolly Mammoth’s entry into the Women’s Voices Theater Festival taking place in Washington this fall, Women Laughing Alone with Salad is a modern, somewhat abstract, powerfully-written work of strong feminism. It moves with a fluid vibrancy, using each of its two acts to turn convention on its head and say some things about the world we live in with a tone and voice that’s impossible to ignore.
The show gets its unique name from a blog post of the same title written by journalist Edith Zimmerman in 2011 for the feminist website The Hairpin. It talked about the shocking number of stock photos on the Internet of women apparently loving life while eating some salad. The idea went viral, turning into a representation of concern held by many of how women are depicted in mass media and advertisements and the effects that could have.
Callaghan took this idea and brought it to life, writing the story of a man named Guy (Thomas Keegan) and the three women in his life: his rich, pill-addled, former-activist mother (Janet Ulrich Brooks); his appearance-obsessed, salad-devouring girlfriend who he ignores (Meghan Reardon); and the free-spirited, confident woman with some curves who he thinks he wants (Kimberly Gilbert).
All four leads turn in performances of great skill and flexibility, deftly navigating a script that is at once dense with emotion and liable to spin off the rails a bit at any time. There are certainly scenes in this play that are confusing and even off-putting, but for the most part they are overshadowed by razor-sharp satire or high-energy fun.
The titular leafy treat might seem to set a tone of easygoing entertainment, but salad stands instead here as a major culprit of feminine oppression. Throughout the play it hangs around in almost every scene as something that is supposed to make women happy and healthy, but carries with it an unsaid imprisonment much like the suburbs in Friedan’s times. Through salad, Callaghan lays out her view of the standing of the modern woman and occasionally compares and contrasts it to that of women at other times in history.
Women Laughing Alone with Salad matches Woolly Mammoth’s consistency in bringing edgy, genre-bending works to the area. It certainly isn’t a play that would fit the tastes of everyone, but it’s a work with some things to say that deserve to be heard.
Women Laughing Alone with Salad runs through Oct. 4. Tickets are available online at ticketing.woollymammoth.net.
