October 30-November 5, 2003

artpicks

Hold Please

theater

We've come so far, people say. Women can vote and work and do what they want. Makes you wonder sometimes what world these people live in. Signs abound -- some of them enormous, flashing and neon -- that women still face great inequities today. Annie Weisman's Hold Please, a four-woman play being staged by Theater Catalyst, highlights a small slice of the still-present hurdles women face in the workplace through perhaps the most user-friendly medium for social commentary: comedy.

Rebecca Wright expresses confidence that people will see that the show, her professional directorial debut, has a heart to it and has something beneath the wacky hijinks. Jessica Graham, leader of Theater Catalyst's woman-centered Eternal Spiral Project, believes that at the core of the play are the realities of job security many women face. How temporary are these women who have worked for 25 years she asks, when women who have given their lives to being secretaries lose [their job] because someone 20 years younger comes in? Weisman adds to the mix a sexual harassment lawsuit and a confrontation with a so-called post-feminist.

Still, Wright calls the play funny, very funny, and even in its moments of hilarity, it reminds us that the struggle for equity has not ended.

Hold Please, Nov. 5-23 , $15-$18, Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330.

—Keegan O'Connor

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