Penetrating look at beauty and its pervasive effects on our culture

 Lisa Marie Nakamura, Ruth Yeo-Peterman, Kathy Hsieh and Sara Javkhlan in "Impenetrable Women" (photo by Rick Wong)

Impenetrable
SiS Productions
(West of Lenin)
through May 3

SiS Productions is presenting Impenetrable, a play by Mia McCullough, and it's a timely and important exploration of the impact of beauty in our culture. McCullough took a newspaper report about a real billboard erected in the suburbs of Chicago, depicting a bikini-clad woman with arrows pointing to areas she could improve with surgery, and fictionalized it into a challenging and provocative story.

As directed by Charles Waxberg, the play starts off with an even more challenging hurdle: many of the beginning speeches are presented directly to the audience. This has an interesting effect of first pushing the audience backward toward creating a bit of a defensive wall, and perhaps making it harder to identify with the characters. However, eventually in the 90 minute presentation, the story is made clear and many of the inner emotions and personal reflections have been opened to us.

The cast is strong, including Kathy Hsieh as a suburban mom who feels like her beauty has been compromised and is struggling to understand how to both empower and protect her bookish, loner daughter (Sara Javkhlan, a young and talented girl who we hope to see more of), Lisa Marie Nakamura as a manager/barista at a Starbucks who puts out an exterior of toughness and sarcasm masking some pain at being maligned as "fat," and Ruth Yeo-Peterman as the young woman who is the subject of the picture and has been so damaged by being seen as "pretty," that she dons a burqua in order to cover herself up.

Also, two men help the story along: Shane Regan in a nicely understated and offhand performance as the love-struck photographer who feels "out of her league" and behaves somewhat badly toward the model in response, and Erwin Galan as a French-speaking Arab spa-owner, who both attracts pity and ire for his lack of understanding for the effects of posting this divisive billboard as an advertising device for his spa.

Can women support each other? Is it too much to ask?

Cast members: Shane Regan, , Sara Javkhlan, Ruth Yeo-Peterman, Lisa Marie Nakamura, Kathy Hsieh and Erwin Galan.

Women make up 51% of our country, yet make 77% of the income most men get in almost every profession. There was a feminist movement that gained great ground in the 1960s and ‘70s and now, everywhere you turn, we have given that ground away again in so many ways. “Girl” was a word that we were taught should go back to being applied ONLY to females under age 18, and now “girl” is used by 50 and 60 year olds: I’m a girly-girl. I’m a theater girl. She’s one of the girls that teaches in that school.

No, we are women. The word “girl” diminishes us and dismisses us. Yet, we are working so hard to stay submerged and diminished.

Makeup is a multi-billion dollar industry made to make women feel like they must fix “flaws” in order to present themselves well. And now, instead of rejecting the constant messages we can’t be just fine with flaws or that flaws individuate us in important and interesting ways, instead men are now being “allowed” to wear makeup, cover up facial flaws with base, add a little eyeliner to give them more interesting eyes.

SiS Productions is opening their next play this week. Impenetrable, by Mia McCullough, is a play that was inspired by an actual event in a Chicago suburb in 2007. A huge billboard of an amazing looking, bikini-clad woman appeared. A plastic surgeon put up the billboard and added  arrows pointing to areas of her body where this woman could have plastic surgery to fix her “flaws.” The people in that suburb protested until the billboard was taken down.

Mia McCullough was inspired to write a fictional story dealing with how women are perceived and the expectation that even that physical perfection is not enough. I talked to Artistic Director Kathy Hsieh about the upcoming production.

Kathy says, “What’s interesting about the play is that it explores four different women, one who is 10, one in her 20s, one in her 30s and one in her 40s and uses the billboard as a starting point. It’s a revealing look at how those kinds of images affect women’s perceptions of themselves. The men I’ve talked to who have heard rehearsals have commented that they find the script fascinating because it gives them insight to women they might not have thought about before.