Next week, Emporia State University will pull off the impossible — a wedding where the bride isn’t the center of attention.
“Five Women Wearing the Same Dress,” a title that at first sounds like a fashion nightmare, follows five bridesmaids as they hide out from the fancy wedding reception downstairs. Each comes to realize that beneath the same dress lie five very different people who nonetheless have more in common with each other than with the bride.
Director Theresa Mitchell said the comedy could be described as “Steel Magnolias” meets “Sex in the City.” There is plenty of emotion and life lessons to be found, but also a whole lot of laughs in a very adult comedy.
“It actually surprised me how funny it is, when you see the people speak it for the first time and creating the characters,” Mitchell said. “I didn’t see that on the page. Maybe I was concentrating on the terrific characters more than the humor.”
Those characters include the bride’s sister Meredith (Erin Schmidt), who has had to live up to her perfect sibling for years; the unhappily married Georgeanne (Barbara Handy), Meredith’s old middle school sidekick; the bride’s cousin Frances (Emily Young), who is very religious and a bit sheltered; the bride’s former friend Trisha (Stephanie Braniff), who has become completely jaded about men; and the groom’s lesbian sister Mindy (Wendy Dolan) who never met a wisecrack she didn’t like. Rounding out the cast is Tripp (Ben Fleer) a bad-boy usher and the only on-stage male presence in the show.
Each of those surface descriptions only goes so far, of course. Part of the play’s power, Mitchell said, is in how it encourages the characters and the audience to go beyond surface assumptions. In fact, at times author Alan Ball seems to revel in breaking stereotype — Mindy’s character, for example, is no butch ultra-feminist but a charm school graduate who can’t wait to hit the shops for another round of beauty products.
“It’s only when we take the time to listen to other people that we can get an understanding and appreciation of them,” Mitchell said.
Getting to that appreciation requires the actors to understand the hidden pain of each character and not just how to go for a laugh.
“That’s something that’s hard to coach out of people,” Mitchell said. “But by this time, most of them have experienced death, or pain, or betrayal and sibling rivalry and other issues. They haven’t exactly experienced the same thing (as the characters) but they can draw upon what they’ve got along with their creative imagination.”
Ball, the play’s author, is also the creator of the TV series “Six Feet Under” and the screenplay “American Beauty.”
The show begins at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 15 through Nov. 18 at the Karl C. Bruder Theatre of King Hall. Tickets are $10 for adults, $9 for seniors, and $5 for students. Tickets can be reserved at the box office at 620-341-6378 or 877-341-6378 (toll free.)
The play is recommended for adult audiences.