Five Women Wearing the Same Dress
Runs through June 27 at the Carrollwood Players Theatre
8 p.m., Fridays, Saturdays
3 p.m. Sundays
$20 ($17 Seniors, Students, and Military)
(813) 265-4000, carrollwoodplayers.org
Review rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress is a play about problems. From personal issues of love, sex and marriage to societal maladies like gender inequality, homophobia, and religion, playwright Alan Ball takes them all on.
The play, directed by Marc S. Sanders, all takes place in Meredith’s (Jen Martin) bedroom after her older sister’s wedding ceremony. She and the other four bridesmaids seek out refuge from the reception in this room, looking down over the festivities from the window. The stage is designed like any ’90s girl’s dream room, a big bed, an exercise bike and a poster of the Breakfast Club cast.
The women are an odd assortment, an evangelical Christian name Frances (Autumn Pandolfo), the sexually experienced and thoroughly jaded Trisha (Mary. F. Jordon), perpetual hot mess Georganne (Alicia Spiegel), and Mindy (Joie Marsh), the groom’s clumsy, gay sister. Together, along with the loud and nosy Meredith, they try to ride out the wedding reception in relative seclusion. The only thing any of them seem to have in common is thorough dislike of the bride, but after a few hours of drinking and talking, lifelong friendships have been forged.
The outline of the play is deliberately bipolar. Act I uses comedy as a tool to get to know all five women and, impressively, by the end of the first half they each stand out as individuals.
In Act II the threads laid in humor unravel in the most honest way possible. Much in the same way that things might get a little too honest after a few too many drinks, so do these women. The content takes a decidedly more serious turn, which can be jarring after having spent an hour enjoying laugh after laugh. It’s also in the second act that we meet Tripp (Paul Jannereth), the man that Trisha has been lusting after for the whole of the play. As the only male in the performance, he brings a perspective to the play had been without up until then. By the end, it seems that there may very well be hope for love.
Five Women is a play about relationships, both with men and women, and none of the issues these women have can be wrapped up neatly by the end of a play. The story is honest in that way, providing little to no resolution for a number of troubling problems, like Mindy’s alienation from her family due to her sexuality. You can imagine a life lived by these characters after your peak into their existences has ended, they continue on. Tripp is not going to solve all of Trisha’s problems, Frances will still be sweet, but intolerant, and Georganne will continue to choose men who are bad for her. The real story arch here is in a kind of sisterhood, each of them knows that they can call on one another for support and advice by the end of the wedding reception.
Apart from a few minor hiccups at the beginning, the Carrollwood Players cast performed enthusiastically throughout the entire performance, each of them finding their stride with the characters they were given. The cozy theater provides a warm experience, bringing you even deeper into a play like Five Women, like you’d been invited to someone’s home to see how things unfold.
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2015.