Deciding which local plays and musicals to go see is always a challenge. There are too many interesting productions going at any given time to see them all, particularly given my orchestra schedule and our camping and hiking adventures.
I usually prioritize the particular plays that I want to see most - I am particularly interested in classics that aren’t performed that often. But also, if friends are in a production, that is a good reason to go see something, even if I am not familiar with it.
This is one of those plays. It is based on a movie, which I, not being much of a movie watcher, was not familiar with. But, the cast looked good, and had a few people I knew who are reliably good actors, so it was definitely worth a shot.
Calendar Girls is a decidedly British sort of story. The women of the local Yorkshire branch of Knapeley Village for the Women’s Institute. There isn’t really an exact US counterpart to this organization, which combines social gatherings with political work and fundraising. And also crafts of various sorts. (All of this is portrayed well in the play.)
The club seems in a bit of a rut as the play opens. The speakers are boring, the crafts dull, and the fundraising sales of calendars of local scenery slow. My book club friend Sofia Reyes has returned as a guest speaker, following up last year’s scintillating topic (“The History of the English Tea Towel”) with one equally promising: Broccoli. (Did YOU know the connection between James Bond and broccoli?)
Their comfortable world suffers a serious blow, however, when Annie’s husband John, beloved by the whole group for his kindness and sense of humor, is stricken with terminal leukemia.
Annie’s best friend, Chris, accompanies her to the hospital often, and is irritated by the terrible sofa in the waiting room. After John dies, Chris decides that the club should raise funds to purchase a better sofa, in John’s memory.
Chris is clearly the rebel in the group, irreverent and unconventional. And she decides to take an unorthodox approach to fundraising.
Noting that the usual calendars had never raised enough to purchase anything as big as a sofa, she proposes a daring idea: the members of the club will pose nude for the calendar.
This causes plenty of uproar, and some members are horrified and refuse to participate. But six do, and the calendar is made.
And that’s just the first half of the play. The second half deals mostly with the fallout - the unexpected success, the blowback from the prudes, the jealousies within the group, and the mandatory good feelings at the end, as John’s sunflowers bloom on the hill. (That’s not a critique - this is the sort of play that should end that way.)
Because this is a British story, there is a lot of dry British humor. So many euphemisms for naughty parts and unmentionables. (Although points for the use of pudenda, which has a venerable history but has fallen into unfortunate disuse.)
I can’t recreate the humor outside of context, but there were a lot of excellent lines - I chuckled the whole way through it.
Gentle fun is poked at the WI, and those who participate in it. The few men in this play are mostly played straight, while the women carry the humor. There are two husbands, a young photographer, and the smarmy television personality, Liam. And that’s it.
The women are definitely the center of the play, and because the group is a close set of friends (and because they get somewhat naked), there has to be good trust and rapport. Fortunately the BCT regulars are on stage together regularly, and have a natural chemistry that really came through in the play.
How to handle nudity on stage is always an interesting question. I haven’t seen the movie, so I have no idea how much is shown there, but in this case, what is visible to the audience is essentially PG. All the key bits are obscured by objects - the specific crafts associated with the woman, so everything from jam jars to yarn balls.
In order to preserve this level, and also to (within the context of the play, where the women are embarrassed to be seen nude by the male photographer) screen the women from view while stripping down, handheld screens are employed throughout (and artistically - it’s very well choreographed.)
And this leads to one of the central questions of the play. Our society (particularly in the US, but also in Britain), has a huge level of discomfort with female bodies that are not young and hard. And I don’t mean that just in the sense that we are uncomfortable seeing older female bodies naked. We are quite often unsure what to do with the very existence of female bodies that are not sex objects. We are uncomfortable with the role of middle aged and older women in society. (Although I think this is improving.) I mean, just to use one thing in the news recently, Don Lemon lost his job in part for referring to a 50 year old woman as “past her prime.” (Nobody says that about men, if you hadn’t noticed. Certainly not at 50.)
I have thought a lot about this, and have had to confront some of my own unconscious biases. All of us - male, female, and non-binary - have been socialized to judge women based on attractiveness and pleasantness, rather than on intellectual merits and skills. We do this without thinking, and, like all implicit bias, have to actively fight against it.
For this production, I think I am safe saying that the women of the club are all past 50, and thus, for Hollywood casting purposes, grandmothers. And they have a variety of body shapes and sizes.
Doing tasteful nudity cannot have been something any of them did lightly, but it was done with aplomb.
Thus, we have the question once again. Why is the idea of a nude calendar by ordinary women in middle age so unusual? Why do we consider only young female bodies to be worth celebrating? I mean, just for a real-life example, if I manage to be married for 50 years, nearly half of that will be with me over the age of 50.
So I say bravi to the women of Calendar Girls for celebrating real human bodies, and you all are beautiful.
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Calendar Girls is playing at Bakersfield Community Theater through this weekend.
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The WI meetings reminded me a lot of an experience of my childhood. While not part of a larger organization with broader goals, my late grandmother was active in a local club at the senior community my grandparents lived in for many years. It was called the Potpourri Club, and existed mostly as a social group, but with local charitable activity. The ladies would get together once a month, have a guest speaker or presentation, send out cards for birthdays, anniversaries, and illness, perhaps deliver a bit of food to someone ill or housebound, and share the local gossip.
As one of three young violinists in my family, we were invited every year or so to play some music. It was a fun gig - the ladies were all very enthusiastic, and even dragged a few husbands along to hear us.
I credit the Potpourri Club for my knowledge of the correct Roberts’ Rules procedures for a meeting - they were very strict about doing it right. And also, it was nice to see the way they looked after each other, a bit like a small town.
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