Woolly Mammoth and improv comedy empire Second City have yet again joined forces, this time for a feminist luau called She the People. Its porcine centerpiece, the ugly beast roasting on a spit throughout, is the patriarchy. Comedic vignettes, directed by Carly Heffernan, pinpoint the indignities suffered by women of all stripes, the quotidian disgraces that are both political and social, domestic and commercial, macro and micro. She the People tackles the wrongs women deal with daily, but through an irreverent lens and at a breathtaking sprint.
You, like me, might ask: Who is She the People for? None of these sketches are subversive, weird, or even remotely persuasive for anyone not already aligned with their central political viewpoint (which is, unsurprisingly, left-of-center). Large stretches of the show feel like a passable episode of Saturday Night Live, minus a celebrity host, but with an all-female cast. The problem here isn’t the players—they’re uniformly enthusiastic and terrific—but their material is regularly subpar, undercooked, and too obvious.
Take, for example, a game-show sketch called “You Oughta Know” (a nod to Alanis Morissette’s hit single) that covers the geopolitical particulars an NPR listener would know, but its comically dumb contestants somehow don’t. The apparent punchline is that no one pays attention to the news. That’s not a good assumption to make in this town, and with this audience, lousy with policy wonks and news junkies.
What can I say? The crowd went wild for these jokes, many of them lame at best. I’ve encountered Second City in my corporate day job, so this “improvised” template seems all too familiar. There’s a sense that brackets are placed around location-specific particulars, with the details filled in afterwards. An audience member may delight when someone onstage makes a reference to our hometown. I guess that’s essential to prefabricated magic.
This show’s weirdest and sharpest sketch—one where a woman in a dinosaur costume is questioned about her strange choice of business attire—is the lone outlier that doesn’t resemble a widget from a laugh factory. She the People is never as revolutionary as it hopes to be, and it’s only funny here and there. I don’t know which fate is worse.
She the People runs at Woolly Mammoth through January 6, with a run time of 1 hour and 45 minutes (and one intermission). $25-$91.
