LADIES’ NIGHT OUT
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JoEllen (JoAnn Montemurro) and Delia (Christine St. John) are trapped one night in a small-town motel in the middle of a blizzard; there’s no way to travel, and even if there were there’s nowhere to go. JoEllen knows this all too well, since she lives in the town: she’s spending her first night away from home in the five years since she got married, the occasion being a conference on careers for women being held at the motel. For fellow conference-goer Delia, the situation is a nightmare: ever since she escaped from New Jersey and moved to Manhattan she’s lived to avoid exactly this kind of hicksville. City mouse, country mouse–but the two do have one thing in common. They’re food addicts.
For JoEllen, eating has gone hand in hand with marriage–a marriage that, though full of caring and companionship, is virtually sexless. Whether her overweight is the cause or the result of the lack of lovemaking, she’s consumed by guilt–and consumes to escape that guilt, though of course she only ends up reinforcing it. When Delia comes barging into JoEllen’s motel room looking for company, JoEllen has been lolling around in her robe, hugging a stuffed dinosaur, singing along with the Chunky chocolate commercial on TV, pining for hubby, and reading the sort of trashy paperback novel that, as Delia says, “you need a pound of M & M’s to get through.”
John Munson’s set design for the two plays–a cramped and cluttered trailer for Thymus, a tidy and spacious motel room for Chocolate Cake–is quite clever; the trailer wall is removed to open up the back portion of the stage, in which rests the motel room bed. Interestingly, the one constant element in the two sets is a kitchen unit–refrigerator, sink, cupboard, and stove–as if to note how often plays about women revolve around the kitchen.
