The Constructivists Invite you to Look Closer at "Women Laughing Alone with Salad"
In a fall theater season held hostage by a global pandemic — when most Milwaukee companies are frantically shuffling, rescheduling, and socially distancing their content, desperate to connect with audiences — it is inspiring to see locally produced theater continue, and continue to push boundaries.
Enter the constructivists, the young, scrappy, and hungry theater company led by Jamielyn Gray, that’s not just carrying on their subversive, in-your-face, socially conscious season of plays, they are exploring the brave new world of virtual performances with reckless abandon. That gutsy, go-for-it, don’t look away style is on full display in their current production, “Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” by Sheila Callaghan. Both the live and recorded performances, which can be streamed through October 4 in exchange for a pay-what-you-can donation, will probably make you wince and squirm as you meet several self-loathing women who struggle with society’s expectations regarding their age, beauty, body size, and sexual allure. Their absurd antics and profound unhappiness, contrasted with the clueless swagger of the men in their lives, are designed to make you uncomfortable. And with the help of a solid cast, spot on sound design, smart use of provocative video montages, and blocking that effortlessly implies proximity, it is bound to succeed.
The play, which debuted in 2015, was inspired by an internet meme that surfaced in 2011 showing a dozen airbrushed, carefully lit stock photos of women grinning at the camera, heads thrown back in orgasmic joy, while holding a forkful of salad greens and maybe a cherry tomato. The proliferation of images of these clean living, exuberant salad bar divas was puzzling to women everywhere, most of whom had been subjected to eating salad as part of a dieting regime and felt anything but happy about it.
Certainly not this happy.
The fact that marketers were using the same bizarre graphics to sell all kinds of aspirational lifestyle products was so absurd to Callaghan that she wrote a play that could potentially explain it, while commenting on the rampant manipulation of women’s insecurities for commercial gain.
In the first half of the show we meet the curvy, “ample” girl Meredith (Liz Ehrler) whose sheer happiness in dancing at a club baffles and excites frustrated writer Guy (Rob Schreiner). With her confidence in the face of society’s body shaming culture, Merdith is much more attractive than his waif-like girlfriend Tori (Paige Bourne), who applies makeup in between trips to the bathroom to purge her tiny meals that undoubtedly include salad.
Guy’s self-absorbed mother Sandy (Sabra Michelle) is too busy with wrinkle-erasing beauty treatments to answer her son’s phone calls and is literally willing to sacrifice body parts in hopes of looking younger. Her fall from rational thought and confidence is even more appaling, since before settling for the role of wife and mother, Sandy was an activist in the women’s movement, carrying signs that said “my body, my choice.” While wondering aloud why the women in his life are so self-destructive, (“It’s okay to want things that are bad for you,”) Guy demolishes their self-esteem with casual sexism and male privilege.
The second act puts the female actors into male roles, as ad men for a pharmaceutical company. While preparing for a presentation, they revel in questionable but quintessentially bro behavior; belittling female coworkers, pontificating about sports and beer, and masturbating to get ready for the big meeting. Flipping genders separates the message from the sender and highlights the chasm between how men and women are expected to speak and act. But it does not cast either sex in a good light.
Guy turns up at the meeting, this time played by Michelle, as the marketing executive in charge of an ad campaign for an antidepressant using images of — you guessed it — women eating salad. According to this “male” brain trust, salad represents self control and status, reinforcing messages to millennials that with this prescription they can be healthy, active, slender, bright, confident, gorgeous, well educated and non-threatening. As Guy summarizes, “We sell drugs to women who cannot cope with the fact that the world sucks for them.”
But in this story of women being robbed of (and giving away) their power, and men speculating about women’s psyches but valuing their bodies over any insight they could discover through honest interaction, the truth is the world sucks for everyone. These are horrible characters doing violent, transgressive harm to themselves and others, while looking for the pill, promotion, food, love, or body image that will finally satisfy them. Both the play and this production of “Women Laughing Alone with Salad” use a sledgehammer to get their point across, which is hard to take for two full hours. But the constructivists have once again done a good job of holding a mirror up to the bizarre, dangerous, and deceitful elements of our society, so perhaps we can make better decisions about how to move forward — maybe without so many gleeful women worshipping salads on billboards.