Review: 6th Street Playhouse’s “Real Women Have Curves”
Note: this show is canceled for this weekend due to illness and extended through June 5 to make up for it.
In “Real Women Have Curves,” five Latina women toil in a small sewing factory in East L.A., enduring long hours and stifling summer heat to make luxury dresses for svelte rich women who, one imagines, wear them to sip cocktails by the pool at some expensive West L.A. house party. It seems like a challenging setting for a comedy, but that’s the intention behind Josefina Lopez’s play, now being presented by 6th Street Playhouse.
Estela (Anakarina Swanson), the owner of the “Garcia Sewing Factory” is worried. The factory is barely making enough money to keep going - in fact, she owes all her employees overdue wages. Ana (Reilly Milton), her younger sister and recent high school graduate, is only there under sufferance while she dreams of being a writer. Carmen (Rosa Reynoza), mother to Estela, Ana and several other unseen children, is worried she may be pregnant yet again. Pancha (Alexa Jimenez) wishes desperately that she could be pregnant and secretly wonders why God made her a woman at all. Rosali (Bethany Regan) will do whatever it takes to be thin enough to fit into one of those size two dresses. On top of all this, while four of the five women are legal immigrants, Estela has neglected to get around to filing her papers – which means that regardless of the heat, she keeps the door shut and a constant eye out for ICE (and not the cooling kind).
To save the factory, and protect Estela, the five women are tasked with making 100 dresses in a week. During this time, stories are told, laughs are shared and occasional tensions flare, but the bonds between these women hold them together. “Real Women Have Curves” is loosely based on the playwright’s own experience of growing up as an undocumented immigrant and working for five months at her sister’s tiny sewing factory. The play touches on themes of feminism, body shaming and domestic abuse, but the playwright is determined to tread lightly, inserting moments of humor that make for comfortable viewing, but are often to the detriment of helping us understand what these women have to bear as impoverished, invisible and largely powerless Latina immigrants in California.
In the 6th Street production, the set, while finely detailed, looks pretty and even spacious rather than the sweaty, claustrophobic environment you might expect. Despite the pressing need to produce the dresses in time, the women are more inclined to chat than to get down to work and, except when the lines dictate otherwise, seem mostly unbothered by what must be almost unbearable heat. There are frequent references in the play to police and immigration, but perhaps in the interests of keeping things light, we are never given any real sense of the dangers waiting to ambush these women in the outside world. This lack of urgency was not helped on preview night by slow pacing and a cast that hadn’t fully established their relationships with each other, but these factors will likely improve as the show settles into itself, and a faster tempo will help convey both the comedy and the deeper tensions that can and should exist concurrently if only to heighten the comic relief.
By the way, “Real Women Have Curves” was published in 1996. Sadly, despite the passage of time, it’s difficult to believe that much has improved for documented and undocumented Latina immigrants today.
“Real Women Have Curves” plays at 6th Street Playhouse, Santa Rosa until May 29. Run time is two hours including a 15-minute intermission. Show times and tickets at https://6thstreetplayhouse.com/
