You won’t succeed as a race car driver if you can’t handle the curves. Baseball batters, too, need to stare down a curve. And women? Aren’t they connected to a whole other type of curves — the kind associated with Sofia Vergara and Sophia Loren?
That’s the first curve that Josefina López’s delightful and thoughtful comedy throws at audiences in the Alley Theatre’s production of her 1990 play, “Real Women Have Curves”: it’s more about the sport of life than sex appeal.
The play, set in 1987, opens in a small Los Angeles sewing factory, where five women turn out fancy dresses for a clothing distributor who sells them to major outlets—Bloomingdale’s is mentioned—with the women being paid less than $20 for apparel the outlets will sell for hundreds. The owner, Estela, is juggling income, bills, and rigid deadlines to keep her business going. Carmen, Pancha, and Rosali work on the dresses while gossiping, worrying about their size, their fertility (or lack thereof), and their futures. The fifth, Ana, struggles to write and find a way out of the factory through college. It sounds like a typical, working-class drama—until early in the play one of the women spots a van parked just outside their doors and sounds the alarm: “La Migra!” that sends all five women looking for places to hide from immigration agents until Pancha cries out, “What are we worried about? We’re legal!”
This comic curve sets the play in a whole new direction that, considering events in national headlines, has a sharp edge. But this is not a play about people of Latin descent v. Federal Agents; it’s about being working women who must constantly deal with curves. Like any good comedy, it dramatizes bolts and bolts of struggles—a sexist boyfriend, a late-in-life pregnancy, infertility—all symbolized by the oppressive heat in the factory that leads to spills and burns on the desperately being produced dresses. Nevertheless it ends in triumph that is, if not total, extremely satisfying—as Ana the would-be writer and stand-in for the playwright, announces in her monologue, “The greatest thing I learned from [these women] is that women are powerful.”
The production itself is as buoyant as the play’s ideas thanks to the ways the five actresses fill their parts with energy and a sense of lived life. Angela Lanza as Carmen, the oldest of the women and the mother of Ana and Estela, makes her character a mature woman in whom audiences will recognize a mother, a sister, an aunt. She does her work, gives herself to it, frets over her children even as she frustrates them. She makes a character with hints of TV-sitcom stereotypes into a believable human being. Similarly Gloria Vivica Benavides as Pancha captures in her face the frustrations not just of work but of her marriage and unanswered prayers for children. Together, Carmen and Pancha form the front line of sewing machines and, surprisingly steer much of the emotion of the play, enabling the other actors to carve out distinct characterizations for their roles. Wisely, Brenda Palestina as Ana holds back from making her character too central a focus—something that, as an authorial mask, she could easily do. Instead, she observes and silently grows.
Director Lisa Portes steers her cast well round the play’s curves — particularly preparing for the play’s most memorable scene where the women strip to their underwear to cope with the heat. It’s not a sexy strip — almost the opposite. It’s a sign of how far they will go to keep going, to not give up, and Portes’ direction makes it integral and funny and powerful. She does so by staging it so mockingly that, if the elderly couple I sat beside are any measure, your Baptist grandmother could not object, though she might keel over laughing.
And laughter is the ultimate curve here. In an era when immigration has stirred us to violence, “Real Women” insists on a focus on the human comedy. In doing so, it suggests hope and progress — if we’ll just keep our eyes alert for the curves.
“Real Women Have Curves” is on stage at Houston’s Alley Theatre through February 15.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University. He writes theater reviews for The Courier.