STAGE VOICE/REVIEW: "THE SECRETERIES" @ ECHO THEATRE

BY: ANDREA BRAUN – THEATRE CORRESPONDENT

The Five Lesbian Brothers are tuned in to what scares the bejesus out of men: Women. What’s scarier than a woman? A woman who knows how to do things  men don’t, like keyboard 112 words per minute, change the toner cartridge and in general run their lives; that is, secretaries. Remember the old term “office wife”? These secretaries (and their female boss who reports to a man) are pre-emptive office widows. We are secretaries and we do things secretarial. / And once a month we kill a guy and cut him up for burial.

Pay attention to the “once a month” bit. It’s key, because what’s scariest of all? Women who bleed! There are lots of jokes about it, like “How can you trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die?” or “Why do they call it PMS? Because mad cow disease was taken.” Okay fellas, The Secretaries get ‘ya back, and when they do, you’re dead meat. The play trots out many of the myths about women, especially in groups, and elevates them to the ridiculous in order not just to debunk but to destroy.

Patty (Amanda Williford) is the new girl in the office of the Cooney Lumber Mill, Big Bone Oregon, 2004. She joins Ashley (Colleen Backer) who is boss Susan’s (Lavonne Byers) favorite and has the pink cashmere sweater to prove it; Dawn (Julie Layton) a predatory lesbian; and Peaches (Sara Renschen), the office freak who can’t stomach an all Slim Fast all the time diet. Peaches is in constant fear of losing her job because of her dress size, and she’s living among a liquid diet cult.

Patty wonders why all the other women have lumberjack jackets, but she’s busy learning her job for which she is enormously overqualified (highly educated, speaks five languages, etc.). But Susan is demanding and Patty also is having trouble fitting in with the other three secretaries who often communicate in a mysterious language of clicks and giggles. Patty may be multilingual, but she doesn’t speak “secretary.”

The set is comprised of four cleverly designed desks that serve as nearly all the “scenery,” except for a large filing cabinet containing a bed for scenes that require one. The walls are painted in dizzying patterns; some of them look like “The Scream” (without the screamer—at least not on the wall). Sarah Woodworth is the scenic artist, design by Tim Daly. Lights enhance the humor and the horror, and the sound design is funny and appropriate. Credit goes to Maureen Hanratty, and Tori Meyer, respectively.

Eric Little directs with a sense of giddy glee (and he used to seem like such a nice person—he gave us the sweet Mary’s Wedding last year, but after Nerve, The Ugly One and now The Secretaries—well, I’m getting a little concerned, if you get my drift). I realize “Grand Guignol” usually refers to drama, but Little is employing its conventions here and the technique results in one sick show. (And I mean that as a compliment.)

Susan, the lipstick lesbian from hell, has all the secretaries in her thrall. She manipulates them in much the same way Daryl Van Horne plays the puppet master of Eastwick. She has a vulnerable (and self-destructive) side, which we learn when she’s in a car with Patty, but mostly she’s the sort who’ll go down on a woman right before she throws her under the bus. She also looks amazing in a teddy, garter belt and stockings. In fact, all the women do near-nudity justice, and they spend a significant amount of time barely dressed.  Woolworth was also in charge of costumes.

There’s a smaller sign on the Cooney Lumber Mill board that lists number of days without an “accident,” but that number never seems to go higher than 29, as Buzz (Layton), a lumberjack in whom Patty has become interested, points out to her. It’s not long before we learn the bloody reason why. There’s also a switch that Patty is warned never to touch which is, of course, Chekhov’s “gun on the stage.” (There must not be one if it isn’t going to be fired, according to the man who shot Hedda Gabler.)

The Secretaries is a funny take on some serious gender inequities in the workplace and in the perceptions of women’s bodies by society. The flaw is that it is a one-joke show, and even at a fairly brisk hour and a half or so (without intermission) that joke wears a bit thin. By the time we get the money scene, the momentum has slowed. Backer and Layton seem to be the natural comics here, although the whole cast acquits itself well. This isn’t a play for the faint-hearted or easily offended, but I had a good time, and I think you will too.

Note About the Playwrights: The Brothers—Mo Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healy, and Lisa Kron—have always generated their work collectively which, despite their queer-inflected name and performance practices, has always attached them to the earliest feminist performance traditions. In the 70s, when “women’s theatre” was just making its mark, collectives like It’s Alright to be a Woman Theatre used performance to make political and ideological claims against the social oppressions of dominant culture.—Jill Dolan, “The Feminist Spectator.”