The five female writers of Live at the Purple Lounge, the new comedy which just opened at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, are all members of Crimson Square’s Writers’s Lab. Each has written a short play set in the green room of the Purple Lounge comedy club, with a different female comic taking central stage. One of the writers, Elisabeth Tsubota, also directed the play, making for a heavy dose of feminist theater.
The subject matters reflect the gender concerns: mother/daughter battles, husband/wife hassles, menstruation complications, lesbianism, and drug addiction. The world of stand-up comedy is a pretty grim and unhappy one in Lounge, though there are bursts of humor, mostly on the raunchy, four-letter side.
One of the ten characters makes an appearance in each scene: Bethany (Maria Proios), who owns and runs the club, serving as a kind of Mother Hen to the beleaguered flock. But even Bethany, it turns out, has had her share of angst, having survived near-fatal breast cancer.
The obvious intent of Live at the Purple Lounge is two-fold: to show how tough it is for women to make it in the dog-eat-dog world of stand-up comedy–-and of course to remind us that behind each wise-cracking show-biz persona is a complicated, fragile human being. The fights, confrontations and revelations that take place in the green room serve to remind us that comedy is a very hard dollar indeed, especially for a woman.
The actors in LIVE are also students in the Playhouse’s drama school Square Theater Company and though some of them sometimes show their inexperience–-slurring lines, losing projection–-they more than make up for it with their youthful energy and drive. The result is a high-spirited, rambunctious production with a great deal of heart.
