What’s up with all the advertising images of unbelievably happy, slim young women enjoying a hearty laugh while eating small bowls of mixed green salad? The absurdity of these images and the subliminal shaming implicit in them has inspired mocking montages on the internet, and now they’ve inspired a play.
Playwright Sheila Callaghan’s “Women Laughing Alone with Salad” at Shotgun Players’ Ashby Stage in Berkeley hammers away at those images over and over again from different angles. Images of rhapsodically jubilant women eating salad or pouring bottled water into their mouths are projected all over the walls of Mikiko Uesugi’s two-story set in Erin Gilley’s video design, occasionally accompanied by generically inspirational but meaningless advertising slogans.
Three women sit on a park bench eating salads and laughing uncontrollably. Later we see this trio again, tearing into a single raw pepper or onion at a fancy restaurant with near orgasmic gusto while the main character, a guy named Guy, looks on in disgust.
Played with prickly hostility by Caleb Cabrera, Guy is characterized primarily by contempt and condescension. When we first meet him he’s leaving a passive-aggressively insulting voicemail for his mother, played by Melanie DuPuy as a carefree rich person making hands-free phone calls to her personal assistant and blithely undergoing grotesquely extreme anti-aging treatments.
He constantly puts down his girlfriend, Tori (Sango Tajima, upbeat and almost desperately eager to please), berating her for eating nothing but lettuce and for pretty much anything she does for his benefit. Even his clumsy attempted pickup of a woman who turns him on with her supposedly forbidden curvaceousness (Regina Morones, bluntly reveling in shallow objectification) is superficial and quickly dissolves into petulant hostility. For a guy who keeps arguing that women should get over their body issues, he sure doesn’t seem to like women very much.
The play seems to have all the ingredients for a challenging satire of the underlying misogyny— some of it subtle and some of it pretty blatant — pervading the constant onslaught of messaging in our culture and mass media. And indeed, there are many sharp and hilarious moments in the show, deftly amplified by Susannah Martin’s savvy direction and the cast’s lively performances.
At the same time, the loose and fragmentary narrative is often a mess. Baffling things just kind of happen without any apparent reason why. The awkward flirtation is transported from a present-day nightclub to metaphorical 1920s Paris and back again. The mother’s uterus falls out on the floor while she’s out shopping. A ton of lettuce is dumped on stage for a sudden, chaotic food fight.
Sometimes this scattershot surrealism is quite funny, such as Tori suddenly doing a furiously aggressive lip-synching dance to Kanye West (with dynamic choreography by Natalie Greene), an acrobatic and cartoonishly unsexy sex scene, or Tajima and Morones playing a couple of swaggering dudes uncomfortably killing time doing amusingly stereotypical macho things. Other times the barrage of random weirdness just gets wearying.
The second act radically switches gears for a welcome change of pace, with everybody playing gender-swapped characters, although it loses steam as it winds toward a somewhat obvious conclusion about what a jerk this jerk is.
It’s a play you want to root for, because its message is so right on. After all, sometimes a salad is not just a salad — it’s a tool of the patriarchy. It’s just that this ‘Salad’ has been tossed so wildly that it’s all over the place.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘WOMEN LAUGHING ALONE WITH SALAD’
By Sheila Callaghan, presented by Shotgun Players
Through: Nov. 11
Where: Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley
Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes, one intermission
Tickets: $7-$42; 510-841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org