We’ve seen the movies and TV shows, and read the thrillers: A heroine enters an empty house where a serial killer waits, walks alone into a deserted parking garage late at night, hears strange noises coming from a basement and decides to investigate even as the power goes out, and her cell phone suddenly doesn’t work.
The woman-in-peril trope is so deeply rooted in culture that it’s standard entertainment, and a money maker.
Playwright Wendy MacLeod has a different agenda as she skewers a host of clichés in Women in Jeopardy!, a quick-witted farce now running through May 26 at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield.
MacLeod takes on some of the standard elements of the woman-in-peril (serial killers, camping alone in nature, women dating menacing men, teenagers in danger, slightly dim-witted cops, desperate middle-aged women) and turns them into loopy comedy. As if that weren’t enough, she throws in another reliably comic ingredient, dentists and their array of medieval-looking tools.
There is a loose plot. Recently-divorced Liz has started going out with a dentist, Jackson. Liz’s oldest and closest friends, Mary and Jo, neither trust nor like Jackson. He’s weird, creepy, inappropriate, given to clumsy jokes that they don’t find amusing.
When one of Jackson’s dental hygienists turns up dead in the office parking lot, Mary and Jo leap to the conclusion that Jackson is the murderer, and a likely serial killer. But persuading Liz that Jackson isn’t merely eccentric but also potentially lethal turns out to be a tall order.
Then, Mary and Jo learn that Jackson is taking Liz’s teenage daughter, Amanda, camping in a remote canyon, but that Liz isn’t going with them. They kick into high gear and go to the police station, where a big surprise awaits. Turns out Jackson has a doppelganger, a slightly wooden but uber-masculine police officer named Kirk, who speaks as if he’s auditioning for Dragnet. Mary is drawn to Kirk, and he to her.
Amanda, meanwhile, has broken up with her snowboarder boyfriend Trenner, who’s always had kind of a thing for Mary, even though she’s a generation older. And Jo plays out her own identity crisis as the third wheel, the woman who always shows up in books and movies as the sardonic, slightly embittered sidekick.
The play is set in Salt Lake City, to which MacLeod makes so little reference that it begs the question why choose it, except that it opens the door to both Trenner, the dude who lives for deep powder, and a few wisecracks about Mormons.
The play’s opening is a bit slow as MacLeod gets all her chess pieces into place, but once she does, the comedy picks up steam, thanks to an expert cast that revels, even luxuriates, in the absurdity of the clichés MacLeod is puncturing right and left.
With one exception, the actors have performed at Shaker Bridge before under the guidance of artistic director Bill Coons, which gives the comedy an expert ease and flair. They’re funny without having to try too hard.
Brandy Zarle plays Liz at a high pitch of lust, longing and denial, tottering around in heels and draping herself over Jackson as if she were a cape, voice rising and falling according to how much wine Liz has drunk.
As Mary, the maternal figure who can whip up a mean bundt cake one minute and fend off Trenner’s advances the next, Laura Woyasz both plays to the stereotype and sends it up. Jeannie Hines is the perpetually irritated Jo, the woman who never gets any satisfaction, no matter the genre — women in jeopardy, romantic comedy, drama.
Dallyn Brunck, in her Shaker Bridge debut, is an appropriately petulant and whiney Amanda. Tim Rush, who doubles as Jackson and Kirk, has perfected the deadpan.
Not least is Haulston Mann as Trenner. Mann has a gift for comedy, playing Trenner as a sweet, befuddled, dim younger version of The Dude in The Big Lebowski. Sure, Trenner is another cliché, the stoner snowboarder with his own California speech patterns. But Mann gets big laughs, thanks to his ability to carry off the verbal and physical comedy.
The woman-in-peril genre does acknowledge in its own unexamined way that, statistically, it’s a dangerous world when it comes to acts of violence against women, although the violence is usually played for cheap thrills rather than empathy.
There have been numerous parodies — the Scream movie franchise comes to mind — and much ink spilled on what the woman-in-peril genre says about gender roles.
But, the depictions of violence against women have become so routine that many audiences simply take them for granted. And they keep coming, which says there is a public appetite for them. (I confess: I’ve watched them and read them, and there’s pleasure to be had in a well-executed thriller.)
Comedy is usually the most effective weapon against such banality. And, we’re lucky to have such playwrights as MacLeod to bite back.
Shaker Bridge Theatre’s production of
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.