Director Susan Messing wants to go back 30 years to a time when comediennes walked around the kitchen barefoot and pregnant–they liked it, and we laughed at it. How will she launch her nefarious plan to stick it to Gloria Steinem?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The 36-year-old Northwestern alum, who most recently appeared in Second City’s main-stage revues The Psychopath Not Taken and Second City 4.0, plunked herself down in front of the company’s archives of scripts, photographs, videotapes, audiotapes, and other memorabilia nestled in bulging yet surprisingly well-organized storage boxes in the closet of its cramped administrative offices. She pored over the material in a few weeks, poking and picking through pile after pile until she uncovered the ripest and raunchiest female-oriented material she could lay her hands on–skits she says embody Second City’s brand of insolent, absurdist humor. She’s incorporated them into Girls’ Night Out, a first-of-its-kind all-female production of some of the best women-centered sketches from Second City’s 40-year history.
Messing, a cofounder of the Annoyance Theatre (she coadapted and directed its hit production What Every Girl Should Know…An Ode to Judy Blume), is familiar with comedy that’s aimed at women but isn’t exclusionary. “I just want our show to be funny, so that a man sitting in the audience won’t think it’s a Jenny Jones pajama party,” she says. “I’d rather shoot myself. If it comes to that, I will shoot myself.”
