Presentation House Catches the Bouquet
By Alan Hindle
Terminal City Weekly
Friday, February 20th 2004

Last week I was hard on Loveplay and a reader sent me the cyber-equivalent of a bag of churning vipers marinating in arsenic. Quite right, too. We swapped a few letters (she's actually a lovely woman) and agreed to disagree. Tuesday night, however, I went to see Five Women Wearing the Same Dress and I hold to everything I said about Loveplay. Five Women, written by Alan Ball (the same guy who penned American Beauty and Six Feet Under), packs more psychology, philosophy, humour and sex into one evening than Moira Buffini did in 2000 years, without having to bang your nut with it. Five bridesmaids with little in common but this god-awful hideous dress the bride has made them wear, hide out from the reception party in the bride's old room and shoot the shit. Every line is a cracker, and all the women, Rebecca Coleman, Robin Ruel, Sarah Sawatsky, Bronwen Smith and Mitzi Thaddeus are rock-solid, crystal-clear and diamond-sharp. This is meat-and-potatoes theatre-not much experimentation going on with the form-but if you want intelligent material delivered flawlessly by living, breathing characters, this is easily the show of the week. Presentation House was packed out, queues for leftovers, on a miserable rainy Tuesday (TUESDAY!) night.

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress by Hornèd Moon Productions at Presentation House until Feb 28th, 604-990-3474.