‘Salad’ takes knife to gender norms
To pursue the feminine ideal is to have your face smeared with whipped cream, your arms reduced to bloody stumps, as you cry out, “I made the choice to stay home with my baby!” It’s to fight your rival for a man’s affections by stuffing salad greens into her mouth until she suffocates. It’s to tell your boyfriend, “I’m sorry I let you ass-rape me. It won’t happen again.”
To pursue the masculine ideal is to garland your every utterance with a masturbatory gesture. It’s to give your listeners the gift of your craft beer expertise as if you’re marking them as your territory. It’s to recruit perfectly sculpted women as your arm candy but then get annoyed when those women have to devote all their time and energy to sculpting themselves into your status symbol.
This is how demented and delirious we’ve become about gender, according to Sheila
Callaghan’s “Women Laughing Alone With Salad,” which was inspired by the disturbing meme of the same name. (Why are there so many stock photos on the internet of women looking unreasonably delighted about chowing down on a pile of lettuce?)
Shotgun Players’ production, which opened Friday, Oct. 19, is a bit like the theatrical equivalent of losing your virginity. It’s vulgar. It’s messy. It’s painful. It’s embarrassing. It doesn’t go the way you think it will. But afterward, you have crossed a threshold. In some small way, you’re a little bit more of an adult.
The play, which is directed with pinpoint precision and joie de vivre by Susannah Martin, begins with gender stereotypes and double standards and contradictions and constraints already shattered into grotesque fragments. Tori (Sango Tajima), Meredith (Regina Morones) and Sandy (Melanie DuPuy), all in sunglasses and shiny trench coats, are sardined on a park bench with bowls of salad on their laps. As they dig in, giggles become guffaws, roughage spilling out of their mouths. The bliss turns nasty, then despairing. Sneers that seem to say, “Don’t you think about touching my salad!” melt into long faces. Expressions seem to ask, “Is this all there is? Is munching on this mound of leaves the happiest I’ll ever be?”
Quite possibly, the play posits, but that’s because the corporate-patriarchal industrial complex — embodied by the oedipal, angsty Guy (Caleb Cabrera) — depends on that self-hatred and has developed a whole system of mechanisms to sustain it. Advertisements, exemplified by a certain type of stock photos, are one of its sharpest tools.
If this sounds preachy, “Salad” is anything but. It makes its points underhandedly, through grisly orgies and projected gifs, through torso-gyrating dance routines and innuendo-redolent emoji, through dream visions and bathos-laden flirtations.
Martin’s cast is crackerjack. As dowager Sandy, DuPuy channels the effortless magnetism of a midcentury Hollywood star, even as she rids herself of organs and appendages. As Meredith, Morones makes the play’s U-turns in tone not just plausible but inevitable. And can any Bay Area actor do springy, devilish mania — the kind where you as audience member feel a little afraid that the stage is in her hands — better than Tajima?
If “Salad” starts out with gender norms already broken into shards, the rest of the play walks you across the broken glass, then puts the norms back together so you can see how they’re constructed. Bloodied and hobbled, you sit there in disbelief that we constantly subject ourselves to this fun-house mirror. But as you leave the Ashby Stage, you can at least see those distortions for what they are and work to clear your vision.