The ‘women laughing alone with salad’ meme is now a play
The “women laughing alone with salad” meme has pretty much become a staple in our Internet repertoire. Always game for a laugh, the meme started back in 2011 over on The Hairpin when some genius noticed the plethora of stock images featuring, well, women laughing alone with salads. The meme has since blossomed into a familiar trope you can whip out on both blogs and at parties, and now, on stage.
Playwright Sheila Callaghan hails from LA, pretty much the capital of women and salad, and is no stranger to the theater scene (her play Fever/Dream went up in 2009) and now with her new show she’s tackling the woman/salad/laughter meme. Even better, she’s doing it for a great reason. She tells the Washington Post of her inspiration:
“Nobody likes salad that much; it’s not built for that. And the notion that you’re supposed to feel that way — [salad] will never be that kind of satisfying. [Advertisers are] saying something more about how we should be feeling about the things that are good for us as women versus the reality of it. That feels funny.”
The play itself centers around three women: An aspiring Yoga instructor named Tori (played by Meghan Reardon), a dancer named Meredith (Kimberly Gilbert), and Sandy (Janet Ulrich Brooks), who never wants to age. Each woman represents a part of Callaghan, but also, a part of every Western woman who is striving to adhere to the media’s idea of “perfect.” As Callaghan said, she wanted to take the stereotype and, “give these objectified, tank-top-wearing women an inner life, and see how that works.”
From the looks of things, it works pretty well. The play began earlier this week and is set to run through October 4th at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, DC. If you’re interested in checking it out, you better get to it while it’s hot, because, as Callaghan explains, “This play is going to disappear in like, a day, because it’s based on an Internet meme. It’s built to vanish.”
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