Reading: "Women Laughing Alone With Salad" at Shotgun Players

I had no idea what to think when I first heard about this play. The title makes no sense, of course. Eventually I Googled it, and found the explanation. Here is a pretty good summary at Know Your Meme. In essence, some years ago someone noted a trend in stock photography, that there was an inordinate number of stock pictures of women laughing while eating salad. It got written up at TheHairpin.com. That spawned a Tumbler blog.

OK, you get it.

But then playwright Sheila Callaghan decided to morph it into a play.

The Play

The play opens with three women, alone, eating salad, and sometimes laughing. The only thing the three appear to have in common (besides an inordinate sense of humor about their salads) is a guy named Guy (played by Joe Estlack). The three women turn out to be Guy's mother (Gwen Loeb), his girlfriend (Aily Kei Roper), and a woman he meets dancing at a club (Jessica Kitchens).

What plays out in the ensuing scenes is a kind of master course in all the things wrong in male-female relationships and human relations to media. All the characters live in various states of unrealistic expectations.  Some of it's pretty funny, some is outrageous, and much is profane. It doesn't end well. And we have an intermission.

Truthfully, at intermission I was thinking I pretty much got it, it was OK, probably would be better as a fully-staged production, but I get the message. Not feeling terribly motivated to stay for the second act, but we did anyway. Good thing.

The second act turns the whole scenario upside down in outrageous and unexpected ways, and it works beautifully. The second act makes the whole first act feel worthwhile. I won't spoil it with details, but suffice it to say that if you leave at the intermission, you haven't seen the play.

The Reading

All the actors were quite good. Estlack is the only one I've really seen before, and he holds the play together nicely at the center, managing to be annoying without mostly being actively awful. He's just sort of passively misogynistic and selfish.

The women have all had to be fairly carefully cast, as the roles call for both specific ages and at least a degree of physical typing. For example, Tori, the girlfriend, is supposed to be 20-25 and bulimic. So that kind of limits the choices. Meredith, the club pick-up, needs to be older and more full-bodied. And Sandy, Guy's mother, needs to be old enough to be Guy's mother and have aging hands. (Just see the play, you'll understand.)

As usual, the Shotgun gang have pulled together a much better production than one would expect with so few hours of rehearsal. Director Trish Mulholland has managed to stage it effectively, using the narration of company member Leigh Rondon-Davis to cover the absence of certain key props and other elements with stage directions. All in all, a very effective staging that gives a pretty good impression of what a full version might be, though there would be some significant vegetable-related challenges at times.

Bottom Line

I came away quite impressed with the play. I think there is a risk that an audience might be put off by some aspects of the first act, which goes on much longer than the second. But the payoff in the second act is well worth the wait, and I suspect that the first act would be more fun with a full production than it was as a reading.

The play has timely messages about gender relations and media, and comes with a full helping of absurdity, thanks to the stock photos from the Internet. It definitely had us talking, both about the play itself and some of the subjects it raised, well into the next day and evening. So it passes the 24-hour test, at least.

Keep an eye out for your chance to see the play. And eat your greens.