Playwright: Leslye Headland. At: Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway. Phone: 773-549-1815 or www.profilestheatre.org; $35-$40. Runs through: March 11
The posh hotel suite is decorated in gold and white. A wall placard indicates its preparation for a wedding, as do the gifts wrapped in similarly delicate colors and the bottles of champagne chilling in the offstage bathtub. In the room are three angry womenGena ( snorting cocaine ) , Katie ( snorting coke and guzzling wine ) and Regan ( snorting, guzzling and gobbling pills ) . None of them are the bridein fact, they all hate the bride. This is why maid of honor Regan has invited the train-wreck duo of Gena and Katie to crash the nuptial-eve festivities.
Well, of course she has! Just as alumni in school-reunion plays are required to have diverted dramatically from previous expectations, so do literary conventions of marriage-ceremony backstage comedies dictate that the damsels in attendance be obsessed with the pursuit of high-status husbands and be uniformly envious of their peer's success. In Leslye Headland's contribution to the genre, these emotions are expressed in the expected cat-chat, as well as the physical destruction currently in vogue for modern mean chicks. Her trio of saboteurs fall down, throw up and pass out. They trash the furniture. They rip the wedding dress. Regan invites a bad boy and nerd boy in for some fun. Then the target of their wrath arrives and she's angry, too.
Not content with sitcom hijinks, the actresses assembled by Profiles director Darrell W. Cox attack their gynecentric archetypes with a ferocity that makes you scour the playbill credits for a referee. Playing the volatile Katie, Linda Augusta Orr conveys the self-loathing of a former prom queen chafing under post-grad disappointment. Hillary Marren likewise lends the statuesque Regan a vulnerability belying her hard-boiled veneer, while Amanda Powell's Gena emerges the most fully recovered from her obligatory trauma-crippled past, and, therefore, the most capable in an emergency. Adam Soule and Erik Burgher, as the ( respectively ) wily Jeff and nurturing Joe, delve their characters for subtextual continuity. Finally, Rakisha Pollard rejects cheap sight gags to forge a schadenfreude-free portrayal of the plus-sized woman of the moment.
Headland claims to have written a morality play aimed at young people on the brink of adulthood ( in our society, that means approaching thirty ) . Beneath the screwball mayhem, however, there also lies a timely lesson in the true meaning of friendship, and the price of the sisterhood that must, inevitably, triumphin fiction, anyway.