Midway through the first act of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone With Salad, three anonymous women sit alone in a fancy restaurant, eagerly anticipating the gourmet lunches they’ve ordered from a waiter named – appropriately enough – Guy.
The first woman has ordered a red pepper. The second woman has ordered a yellow pepper. The third woman has ordered an onion.
Satire or truth? Or both? “This is not a dream,” one character says late in the play. “It’s an exaggerated reality. It sucks.”
Yeah, it does suck, living as we do in a society where Callaghan’s title is taken from an actual meme, reflecting the shaming that treats women and their bodies as feared objects rather than self-realizing subjects. We live in a nation that is more puritanical about sex than any developed country – and that simultaneously consumes more porn than all of those countries. We live in a country where our fear of death leaves us afraid to live.
Callaghan makes clear that the control a patriarchy exercises over women’s bodies – and the way women turn on each other as they internalize those controlling mechanisms – hurts women most. But she also drives home that patriarchy ultimately harms everyone. It warps our sex lives by distorting our fantasies, making us afraid and ashamed of what we want.
The Personal is Always Political
As suggested above, Callaghan’s weapon of choice is satire, which doesn’t just make this play wickedly funny as well as razor sharp. Satire also allows Callaghan to widen her frame beyond the individualized stories of her characters and indict the society that’s made them who they are.
None of Callaghan’s characters are villains. Sure: they make bad choices, often involving self-inflicted wounds. And yes: they can be ridiculous, although you’ll also ache for them while laughing at some of the things they do.
But even as Callaghan sketches the individualized stories of Guy and the women in his life, she’s also making a larger point about how our obsessive and often narcissistic focus on our bodies aligns with a political landscape that’s selfish and mean – and with a toxic version of feminism which is less about replacing the patriarchy than duplicating it.
If the brilliant Caryl Churchill and plays like Top Girls come to mind, they should. Churchill’s consistent focus on the intersection of class and gender – and how women therefore ignore their marginalized sisters while being consumed by their own drives and fears – is the encroaching darkness at the edge of Callaghan’s play.
It’s no accident that Callaghan is a writer and producer of the long-running Shameless, featuring its own indictment of America’s regressive class politics. Nor is it an accident that one of the main characters in Salad spends her early days as a crusading Second Wave feminist, before devolving into a self-absorbed shadow of her formerly idealistic self.
Coming on the heels of August’s heady celebrations of the 19th Amendment’s centennial – and in the midst of a second pandemic involving this country’s systemic racism – the Constructivists’ production of Salad therefore asks some particularly hard questions that the largely white and upper-class feminist movement didn’t ask itself enough 100 years ago. And still doesn’t ask itself enough today.
For if we’re going to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of a sexist world showcasing women laughing alone with salad, what will we build in its stead?
Are we going to settle for an ostensibly different but similar version of a world in which we’re consumed by our need for control, all while perpetuating the power structures we’ve inherited? Will we settle for crumbs from the floor rather than effecting a wholesale change in the menu?
Or might we instead fight for a feast in which all of us can eat and drink at the same table, sharing our resources so that we might each fulfill our needs and become our best selves? Maybe, in such a world, we can actually enjoy a good salad and so much else, while laughing – and loving – together.
– Chicago, September 3, 2020
