Five Women Wearing the Same Dress at Spotlighters Theatre 📸Eduard Van Osterom

Five Women Wearing The Same Dress at Spotlighters Theatre

TheatreBloom rating:

Dum-dum-daaah-dum. Dum-dum-daaah-dum! Always a bride’s maid and never a bride, right? But who needs to be the bride when you can be one of Five Women Wearing the Same Dress? The penultimate show in Spotlighters’ mainstage season, this oddly-out-of-sorts-with-itself comedy by Alan Ball is a unique examination of five women in the mid 90’s who all have one thing in common: they’re the bride’s maids in a wedding where the bride herself seems none too popular. Directed by Hillary Mazer, the production is full of witty little moments as well as some more emotionally weighted ones and is an usually balanced evening of comedy and drama presented in an entertaining format.

The majority of this show’s problems is playwright Alan Ball’s cohesivity, or in cases, lack thereof with his overarching plot. Ball, as a successful television screen writer, fails to understand that a two-act play is not the same as a multi-episode, or even multi-season show where little threads of subplot and side-stories can wend their way naturally into the primary action and be fleshed out along the way. In Five Women Wearing the Same Dress there’s a tertiary romantic subplot that comes winging way out of left field getting a whole bunch of stage time that seems jarringly out of place with everything else that’s happening in this production. (The five women spend a whole host of time talking about one male, albeit vile and villainous, character only to have some completely different male character, who sort of barely gets mentioned, make up this final scene in an intimate and intricate love-twist with one of the women.) There’s also an imbalance of comedy to dark, emotionally charged drama, and the way some of the reveals are written in the script don’t flow as naturally as one might expect. It’s not without its laughs or its truly gut-wrenching moments, it just comes together strangely.

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress at Spotlighters Theatre 📸Eduard Van Osterom
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress at Spotlighters Theatre 📸Eduard Van Osterom

First-time director Hillary Mazer, has done a decent job for her first time directing a full-length stage play. The show presents its own challenges, as does blocking and staging in the Spotlighters’ intimate, theatre-in-the-square with view-obstructing load-baring support beams that corner the theatre into place. While the bed— the main furnishing— is angled in one direction that at times precludes some of the audience from seeing what’s happening on it (and very briefly under it) Mazer does a good job of keeping the characters in motion, especially when they are enacting their more agitated scenes. There are some dialogue pacing issues; these occur mostly in more heated exchanges of dialogue where the actors really should be jumping over top of one another’s lines to get the urgency of the scene across, but they occur infrequently enough that they don’t disrupt the overall flow of the play too intensely. Some of the actors also suffer from ‘trail-off’ syndrome, which in this space creates sound-barrier issues to some of the audience. As their sentences conclude, their projection and volume die with. And some of the performers don’t project as well as they should when their characters aren’t screaming or existing in a heightened state of emotion. (This has been a chronic problem, not exclusive to Spotlighters, for a great many performers coming back to live theatre this side of the pandemic, forgetting that ‘intimate scenes’ or moments shared with one another actor still need to be heard by the entire audience.) Ultimately the comedic lines are delivered well and each of the women (and the one man whose character gate-crashes the play at the end for no particularly good reason) finds a way to manipulate their vocal affectation into some hint of a southern Tennessee accent.

Sound Designer Erin Klarner gives us all the great sounds of a rowdy wedding reception every time the door to the upstairs bedroom opens, and there is a good balance of era-appropriate music (though this comes into questionable contest as the play itself states that it is set in the mid-90’s but some of the music appears to be from the late 80’s and early 90’s, which is fine as there wasn’t any music from after the play was set being used, just seems an odd choice at times) for when the scenes shift to keep the audience engaged as players exit the space and re-enter it.

Alan Zemla’s set design looks like it was stolen from a production of Steel Magnolias; the entire room is puked upon in shades of blush and bashful. (It’s actually insanely appropriate for the girl-who-grew-up-in-the-80’s somewhere in sweet-south Tennessee, right down to the pink and white wainscotting that borders the interior.) There’s something overly childish— the forced-upon etiquette of Tennessee debutant dominates the room’s décor, which is a perfect contrast to Meredith, the woman who actually lives in that room when it’s not being used as a hideaway for the bride’s maids who are all, for their own reasons, trying to avoid the wedding reception downstairs. The attention to detail in both decoration and physical structure of the room is impressive; Zemla’s finest work on this set is the mock bay window, curtains and wallpaper on the far side of the room.

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress at Spotlighters Theatre 📸Eduard Van Osterom
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress at Spotlighters Theatre 📸Eduard Van Osterom

For a show entitled Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, Costume Team Jenifer Hollett, Kathy Case, Fuzz Roark, and the cast, do an exquisite job of getting identically-styled bride’s maids dresses. Each of the five women, however, end up in a different color. Whether this is script compliance of directorial choice remains unclear, but each of the five characters have been fitted in a shade of deep teal, aubergine, dusky mauve-rose, navy, and faded baby pink-peach that suits their complexions divinely. (I’ve only ever been in and been to weddings where all of the bride’s maids and made of honors dresses are both identically styled and colored, so seeing the same style in different colors is a unique and curious choice for me.) All five women are granted matching pillbox-fascinator lace pieces that the characters seem to hate, but truly they look bridal chic and add just that hint of southern glamour to the overall look.

Despite his scene feeling oddly out of place, extremely superfluous and like it belongs in its own, separate Alan Ball play, Mike Purmell, as Tripp Davenport, shows up and just sort of wows the audience with his congeniality and genuine approach to this misplaced character. Purmell slides into the bedroom, playing exclusively against the Trisha character as if he’s been a part of this narrative the entire time, as if there were a great many missing scenes that existed between them (think of their story as the spin-off from a main show where they were the side-plot and now we’re getting an exclusive on them, only we never got to see their side-plot happening in that first show.) Purmell delivers a flirty character and doesn’t go for the Tennessee accent (and that’s completely okay.) This scene is one of the scenes where dialogue trails off the most, both in the volume levels between the two and the natural pacing in which they exchange it. But these issues aside, Purmell finds his footing in a character that exists for but a few moments and makes you believe that he’s been there the entire time.

Jennie Phelps as Trisha 📸Eduard Van Osterom
Jennie Phelps as Trisha 📸Eduard Van Osterom

Trisha (Jennie Phelps) has the second most consistent and believable southern-sounded accent of the bride’s maids. Everyone in this production brings varying degrees of southern sound to their character (all five of the women at any rate) and its Phelps who does so with the most poised airs and graces. You get the politely reserved southern socialite flare from the way she moves and speaks, but also that she’s genuine and compassionate. Often appearing as the sympathetic ear to the woes and troubles of the Meredith and Georgeanne character, Phelps’ Trisha is both congenial and welcoming. While she is no mild personality, the dress they’ve given her— the dusky mauve-rose blends right in with the curtains at the mock bay window and you could lose her in that section of the set if she stands still. When Phelps’ character starts talking about AIDS and getting tested there is a deeply moving sincerity that draws light to how gracefully she just accepts the slut-shaming that’s being slung around because she’s slept with many a man in her time.

Dorky cousin Frances (Brittany ‘Britt’ Martin) is portrayed to be the youngest and perhaps most innocent of the women involved in the wedding party. She’s eager and chipper but deeply innocent in every stretch of the word. (Though this comes to blows with the directorial choice to not cover the actress’ full-shoulder-sleeve-style tattoo. Beautiful though it is— and it is rather stunning— it doesn’t fit in with the ‘I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs, I’m saving myself until marriage, I’m a Christian!’ mantra that gets repeated over and over and over again for the character throughout the play.) Every time something slightly controversial gets brought up, drinking, doing pot, waiting until marriage for sex, Martin hilariously and eagerly delivers the line in one form or another, “I don’t do that. I’m a Christian.” She says it with such joyous earnestness and eager innocence that it becomes a good trigger for laughter from the audience. When she goes off on her tear against the anti-Christian-ness of everything, it’s very powerful and well executed at a full, articulate volume.

Eleanora Hyde (left) as Georgeanne and Brittany 'Britt' Martin (right) as Frances 📸Eduard Van Osterom
Eleanora Hyde (left) as Georgeanne and Brittany ‘Britt’ Martin (right) as Frances 📸Eduard Van Osterom

Georgeanne (Eleanora Hyde) is a blast of chaos that funnels her way into the room unexpectedly, though almost exactly might you like expect at least one of the bride’s maids to be— loud, drunk, and waving a bottle of booze around in the air. Hyde’s character, who has a dark and somewhat miserable past that gets exposed to Trisha, is one that unfortunately too many women can relate to. Her energy stands tall and strong all throughout the performance, even when she’s adrift in the background of other things happening in the moment. With vivid facial expressions, Hyde takes many turns being the liveliest of the bunch of five, even though that seems to be Meredith’s goal— to be the center of attention.

Rebellious, obnoxious, and all-together a mess, Meredith (A.J. Ramsey) feels very much like that ‘little sister of the bride’, petulant, bratty, a rebel without a cause— right up until the big reveal in the second act of just why she’s so rebellious. Ramsey holds her own against the other women in the production, particularly when it comes to being a chaotic dervish that goes rogue (or as rogue as one can go at a wedding reception when the action of the play is contained to one room, away from the actual ‘action’ of the aforementioned reception.) Balancing the whiny nature of the character, Ramsey finds a way to keep the Meredith character from being dismissed as obnoxious and jealous, even if she is difficult to swallow the first couple of times she starts complaining.

Samantha Murray as Mindy. 📸Eduard Van Osterom
Samantha Murray as Mindy. 📸Eduard Van Osterom

Mindy (Samantha Murray) is blunt. Mindy is hilarious. And Mindy might just be the queen of comedy in this production. Murray stumbles— literally— into the scene like that oblivious party guest who’s just trying to remember why she’s there in the first place and it’s all hilarity from there. That isn’t to say that Murray doesn’t have her moments, when Mindy is deeply steeped in the emotional gravity of those heavier confessions, but for the most part, Murray’s Mindy is a comic class act. When she goes off on her fond reminiscence over her time at Charm School in the sixth grade it’s a true scream. Cheeky and sassy and loudly expressive, you also get the raw, visceral side of this character when Murray goes off on the “men are f**ked” rant, which is both empowering and tragic to have to hear. Murray’s character gets loads of hysterical lines, which she delivers excellently, including “…with this pin cushion on my head I look like a hooker from the Twilight Zone.”

Ultimately a good evening with some very heavy dramatic themes mixed into the more humorous insanities that accompany most wedding receptions, Five Women Wearing The Same Dress provides an alternative evening of stage entertainment that isn’t your usual bill of fare of the Baltimore Community Theatre scene.    

Running Time: Approximately 2 hours and 20 minutes with one intermission

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress plays through June 12, 2022 at The Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre— 817 St. Paul Street in the historic Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore City in Maryland. For tickets call the box office at (410) 752-1225 or purchase them online.


Advertisment ad adsense adlogger