Theater Pub Posts, May through July, 2015

Yes, I've been having a busy summer. Yes, I feel bad for neglecting this blog. Yes, I've kept writing my twice-monthly column for the San Francisco Theater Pub site. Here's a link roundup of my pieces from May through July.

May 14, How Theater Became a Good-Girl Pursuit: an attempt to figure out how "theater went from being considered on par with prostitution, to being considered on par with the chess club," as my editor put it.

May 28, Forewarned is Forearmed: by popular demand (i.e., I asked my Facebook friends what I should write about, and they suggested this topic), I wrote about the contentious subject of trigger warnings, and what place they might have in theater.

June 11, She Submits to Conquer: as part of the ongoing conversation about gender parity in theater, I revealed the inspiring submission statistics for the Pint-Sized Plays, the short-play festival I'm producing this month. The gender breakdown of submissions was 60% female, 40% male, and the festival lineup also reflects that ratio. I also offered some ideas for "best practices" that will encourage women to submit. (Also of note, American Theatre magazine linked to this article on their Facebook page!)

June 25, Give Him A Great Big Kiss: about taking on my first acting role in seven years, sexy secretary Elsa in The Desk Set, rehearsing my first stage kiss, and playing a sexpot when I tend to consider myself a nerdy late bloomer.

July 9, The Tech Set: a brief column listing all of the seemingly ridiculous things that people discuss at tech rehearsal, especially when it's a show with as many props as The Desk Set! As a side note, this was a conscious attempt to write a column in the style of Allison Page, my smart and hilarious fellow blogger (and The Desk Set's leading lady).

July 23, My Dance Card Is Full: I basically took the week off from writing my column, though I did submit a picture of me in costume for my minor role as a business journalist in The Desk Set.

Happy Holidays from THE DESK SET

The rumors are true: I'm going to be appearing in a play next summer for the first time in years. I'll be playing the supporting role of Elsa and serving as Dance Captain in a production of the classic 1950s office comedy The Desk Set, by William Marchant. The production will be directed by Stuart Bousel, produced by No Nude Men, and presented at the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco.

Above is a photo of the full cast (I'm standing, second from the right). The Desk Set takes place around Christmastime and though our production happens in July, we decided to start our promotional campaign early by doing a holiday-themed photo!

We also took photos of smaller groups of characters. Below are the four main women: Jeunee Simon as Sadel, Kitty Torres as Ruthie, Megan Briggs as Peg, Allison Page as Bunny.

Here I am with my fellow supporting women: Carina Lastimosa Salazar as Miss Warriner and Lisa Drostova as the Mysterious Lady. I am wearing one of my grandma's cocktail dresses from the '50s. It always amazes me that she had such a va-va-voom dress (there is a nude-colored fabric lining underneath the black lace, and the illusion is quite realistic in person) but Elsa is the office sexpot, so it's character-appropriate! Though also a little strange -- I have never played a sexpot or had to do a stage kiss before.

And here are our handsome gentlemen: Abhi Kris as Mr. Bennett, Andrew Calabrese as "Shirtsleeves," Nick Trengove as Abe, Alejandro Emmanuel Torres as Kenny, and Alan Coyne as Richard.

Randomly and bizarrely, we discovered that a teenage Barbra Streisand played my role, Elsa, in a summer stock production of The Desk Set just a few years after the original Broadway production. Here's a picture from the office-party scene of that production; Barbra is dancing, second from right.

And if you want to know the plot of Desk Set or what I think of it as a play, here's the review I wrote on Goodreads.

The Desk Set: A Comedy In Three Acts by William Marchant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For a mid-century, middlebrow comedy, The Desk Set is kind of a bizarre play. On the one hand, it's loaded with 1950s kitsch: female employees running out of the office midday to buy party dresses at Bonwit's; jokes about philandering executives and sexpot secretaries; a rather un-PC joke about Mexicans. The main character is a super-smart, capable, acerbic woman named Bunny (something that really puzzled me when I saw the film version as a child -- how could the no-nonsense Katharine Hepburn play a woman with such a silly name?) who spends a bit too much time hoping that her boss/boyfriend, who's clearly not as awesome as she is, will put a ring on it.

On the other hand, The Desk Set is a play about four intelligent working women who fear that they are going to be replaced by a computer, which is a surprisingly modern problem. The depiction of Richard, the character who wants to install computers in the office, also feels perceptive about how "techies" behave: he's not a bad guy, but he's kind of single-minded and socially awkward. While the play has a happy ending that suggests that people and technology can coexist, 21st-century audiences may find it a little more poignant than originally intended. After all, the women in the play work for the research department of a broadcasting company, where their job is to do fact-checking and answer queries like "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" (The play takes place around Christmas.) But these days, you can just pull out your iPhone and ask Siri.

All photos (except for the Streisand one) by Cody Rishell.