Anjalee Deshpande Hutchinson
Bucknell University, Fall 2009
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress Director’s Notes (Included in Program)
DIETER & ISAAC: We are your wedding planners, darling. We’d been thinking of a sort of nautical theme for you setting out on a voyage together, that was the idea but if you prefer it here in the woods, we can change it, no problem. We can change it to a woodland theme or a rocky hill and crag theme. And we could do the hand-fasting ceremony, calling on all the four directions, for the blessing of the deep and fruitful earth, invoking the God of Love. Or a golf course theme. All the bridesmaids dressed as caddies, little golf bags on every table holding wedding candies.
JULIAN: It’s lovely here. Nature. All untrammeled and untamed.
HEINER: I hate nature. The muck. The tangle of it. Mile after mile of empty meadows. Nothing has been arranged with any sense of economy or restraint. I like a landscape that shows some evidence of having been touched by human hands.
JULIAN: And yet here in the natural world you have the open air, fresh water, the companionship of animals in their natural homes.
HEINER: I look at nature and I think: did god have any taste at all? The shapes are grotesque. The colors are garish. The smells are horrid and your feet are always wet.
From A Perfect Wedding
By Charles L. Mee
Playwrights Alan Ball and Charles Mee share a common theme in their plays about weddings; the exploration of a culture that Ball says promotes “purchasing a pre-packaged experience” rather than living a genuine experience. Both playwrights, with rich Southern roots have very vibrant and visceral descriptions of large societal weddings in the South and the pressures that come with these monumental rites of passage. While Mee focuses on how these pressures affect the bride and groom, Ball’s play concentrates on a lesser-studied group known as the Bridesmaids.
As anyone who has ever been a bridesmaid knows, her feelings are the least of the day’s concerns. As one of the bride’s ladies in waiting, her main duty is to appear, like the bride, flawless. The bridesmaids are both props and decorations and often times asked to be devoid of all individual personality in an effort to create an aesthetic that is at it’s core – elegant, tasteful and inauthentic. Like the tangle of nature that Mee describes, the “natural” woman is grotesque and must be ‘tamed’ with economy and restraint in order to make her part of the perfect wedding. This wedding aesthetic is the metaphor through which Ball examines his lifelong thematic exploration: living an authentic life in an inauthentic world.
Just as the bride demands the bridesmaids squeeze themselves into dresses and hairstyles they would never choose for themselves, so too does our culture force women to squeeze into roles and choices that try to restrain who they are in an effort to become who they should be. Each of the women in this play has constricted their own natures to fit with cultural and societal expectations of who they should be. It is only when they begin to see the madness in each other that they can see it in themselves. It is only when they begin to support each other that each of them begins to throw off the mantle of expectation and really blossom and grow. It is only when they help each other that they finally realize happiness only becomes possible when we accept what we are instead of what we are supposed to be. And although what we are may be is unsightly, untamed and overgrown what we are not – is alone. So sit back and relax. Get ready for garish colors and grotesque sights. Prepare to smell bad and get your feet wet. Enjoy Five Women Wearing the Same Dress.