Rude, irreverent and outrageous, Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad is a comedy that takes no prisoners. It shoots down with fiendish glee every single target in its sights: mothers and sons, boys and girls, boys and boys, girls and girls, the pharmaceutical industry, the diet craze . . . and more, much more. Developed in part in Center Theater Group’s Writers Workshop, then at the Woolly Mammoth Theater Co. (in Washington, DC), where it was finally produced in 2015, Women Laughing is a hoot from start to finish, thanks not just to Callaghan’s clever script but to the director and cast’s inspired work. CTG’s production values, ranging from Keith Skretch’s video projections to Keith Mitchell’s lettuce-themed set, made big contributions as well. Lettuce is the magic word here. The play opens with three women (Dinora Z. Walcott, Lisa Banes, and Nora Kirkpatrick) sitting on a park bench, eating salads. Without exchanging a single word, they come to a mutual understanding of just how ridiculous they must look: three females munching away on rabbit food just to keep from gaining weight. They begin to giggle and cackle. When a man (David Clayton Rogers) enters and tries to sit down they flick bits of salad at him, drive him away with their mad shrieks. Left alone to enjoy themselves, they get into boisterous food fight that leaves them howling with laughter. The theme of bodies and behavior underlies everything that follows. There is scene in a disco where Rogers, now playing a horny man/child, hits on a plump but sexy dancer (Walcott) because 1) he fantasizes that she’s exotic and sophisticated (she’s been to Berlin!) and 2) because he’s got an extremely skinny girlfriend at home (who’s never been anywhere!). A menage a trios follows, leading to a flawlessly choreographed and executed sex scene that could not be topped for hilarity. Rogers has a third women in his life: his mother (Banes), a rich, elegant divorcee who majors in shopping and narcissism. Although she knows she’s spoiled him — and molested him as a child as well — she can’t understand why he’s such a messed-up wimp. “Grow up and act like a man,” she shouts at him. In Act Two, Callaghan (writer/producer of TV’s “Shameless”) unexpectedly flips the play on its head. The actors switch genders, with Banes, Kirkpatrick and Walcott now playing men–employees in the ad department of a pharmaceutical company — and Rogers impersonating (in tailored power suit) their cold-blooded female boss. The switch gives the playwright the opportunity to satirize men as savagely as she did the opposite sex in Act One. Callaghan also turns her guns on the advertising campaign these marketing-whores have hatched up to promote a pill that will magically turn women into ideal creatures: slim, smart, capable, confident, and above all blissfully happy. The accompanying video images show women holding bowls of salad and laughing idiotically while being sprayed with suggestive streams of water. The comedy is non-stop in Women Laughing Alone with Salad and always unconventional, fantastical and gut-wrenching.
