Wendy MacLeod’s comedic play “Women in Jeopardy” has been described as “‘Sex and the City’ meets ‘Murder, She Wrote.'” The modern comedy-murder-mystery tells the story of three 40-something divorcée friends, and two of them have suspicions about the other’s creepy new boyfriend.
The show is a production of Georgia Ensemble Theatre, opening Feb. 16 and running through March 5. Atlanta-based playwright and screenwriter Topher Payne is directing the show, and he joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom along with actors Stacy Melich and Parris Sarter.
Interview highlights:
Three best friends grappling with mid-life, change, and a weird new boyfriend:
“Their friendship is a very close friendship. They’ve been friends for many years, with their children, through marriage, now divorced,” said Sarter. “They have ‘Chardonnay Tuesdays,’ they have fun runs and book clubs, things like that, and so these women are a wonderful trio. And so when we meet this new person, it kind of breaks up this well-knit, very close trio that is a very loving, ‘got your back’ kind of girlfriends’ friendship that is unbreakable. But it’s fun to watch as… Liz changes the rules, because she now has a love interest.”
“If you’re asking Liz, he is the most phenomenal man you’ve ever met,” said Melich. “One of the best qualities that he has is his sense of humor and how easily he makes Liz laugh, and also it’s really important that he gets along with her daughter and has interest in being that kind of a full family. And she just thinks that his quirks are endearing.”
A writer with a reputation for compassionate humor in wild circumstances:
“This is the third production of a Wendy MacLeod play that I’ve had the chance to direct. Her best known is probably ‘The House of Yes,’ which was adapted into a film a number of years ago starring Parker Posey, and then I directed another show of hers called ‘The Water Children.’ And ‘Women in Jeopardy’ is one of those shows that a bunch of my friends have already had the chance to get their hands on, and I was very excited to be able to return to Wendy’s use of language,” said Payne. “She has an extraordinary wit and gift for patter, and places her characters in the most extraordinary of extraordinary circumstances, and as a director, it’s just really, really fun to lead a team through a story like that.”
“I think the genius of our playwright… is by taking all of those feelings of uncertainty and possibility and dangerous adventures that we experience at mid-life, and filtering it through the lens of a paranoid thriller,” Payne remarked. “Mary believes herself to be, increasingly so, throughout the course of our story, the heroine of a Hitchcock story.”
Playing up this “noir-midlife-comedy-murder-mystery” with music, setting and cast:
“With Parris as Mary and Valeka Jessica as Jo, we have our two Hitchcockian heroines making their way through all these dangerous circumstances in the dark streets of Salt Lake City,” mused Payne. “So I’ve been spending a lot of time with the production team listening to the scores of Bernard Hermann, specifically his unused score for ‘Torn Curtain;’ there’s an entire lost score for that film that was never used in a Hitchcock movie, and we’ve had the opportunity to pull motifs from that.”
He added, “What’s interesting in the storytelling that we’re doing at Georgia Ensemble is, Parris and Valeka, as our Hitchcockian heroines, are played by Black women in circumstances that we associate commonly with a white actress. There was never a Black female lead in a Hitchcock movie, and that’s his bad luck and our bad luck as audiences. Diahann Carroll would have been an amazing Hitchcock heroine – where’s that movie?”
“Women in Jeopardy” is on stage at Georgia Ensemble Theatre through March 5. Tickets and more information are available at get.org/women-in-jeopardy.
