Some time ago playwright Adam Bock put together The Receptionist--a clever, little comedy about office life that gradually descended into darkness. Only a few years later, the creative team of Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Lisa Kron produced an altogether darker office satire Secretaries. Collectively known as The Five Lesbian Brothers, the quintet developed something altogether darker and more surreal than Bock’s comedy.
The play is about a woman who has gone to work in the secretarial pool of a lumber mill. It’s something of a fascistic office environment complete with a forced Slim-Fast diet, a strange clicking secretarial language and the occasional disappearance of a lumberjack. It’s comic workplace horror in a script that takes aim at “the warping cultural expectations of femininity.”
The 2010 play is brought to the stage of the Underground Collaborative early next month courtesy of director Tessara Layne Morgan. It’s a story that should be right at home deep beneath the heart of downtown Milwaukee. The cast includes Amy Hansmann, Kristin Johnson, Amanda Eaton, Maddie Wakely and Cari Dulan.
Secretaries runs June 10 - 12 at the Arcade Theatre in the Underground Collaborative on 161 W. Wisconsin Ave. for ticket reservations and more, visit Brown Paper Tickets online.
