Vanities Proves Vain

Billy Wildrick, Cayman Ilika and Jennifer Sue Johnson in Vanities. 

The point of Vanities may be the evolution of true friendship, but its success lies in making teenage girls look like vapid dolts. Playing at ACT Theatre in collaboration with 5th Avenue, the show, based on a 1976 play of the same name by Jack Heifner, opens with a musical laundry list of a teenage girl’s typical morning (the actresses chant about lipstick, hairspray, mascara, blush…). Football, boyfriends and the pep rally dance are all the girls can talk about as every preppy cheerleader stereotype you can think of crops up in the first section. This scene ends in a shake-your-head moment when the president’s assassination is announced, and the girls tremble at the thought that the pep rally might be canceled. (Thank God it isn’t.)

The play continues with similarly hollow content, following the friendship of three Texas cheerleaders from high school to college and through their post-adolescent years.

The few parts that begin to open the window on plot-deepening elements (the school-wide announcement of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a dorm room discussion of sex and the Pill, one character’s post-psychotic breakdown self-discovery) are quickly breezed over or avalanched in kitschy song and dance. 

And the song and dance is good. Really good. This show boasts three talented women with strong voices who fully embrace their characters’ personalities, mannerisms and voices. Although visually pleasing, with retro wigs and costumes, and a stage outlined in light bulbs to mirror the three vanities at its rear, the story falls flat, never fully achieving emotional depth or escaping cliché. It is a story told too many times before. Think Sex and the City meets Grease. Perhaps the material was cutting edge for an audience thirty years ago, or maybe, like the mean girls of the play, we’ve just become snobs.

The lights come up in 1963; it is senior year for three best friends on the cheerleading squad in a small Texas high school. Kathy (Cayman Ilika) is the captain of the squad, a bossy hyper-organized “good girl” whose life is guided rigidly by self-made lists. Joanne (Jennifer Sue Johnson) is the air-headed dreamer who longs only for marriage and domestic bliss. Mary (Billie Wildrick) shows the early seeds of a sexually uninhibited wild child.

Some of the cliché shakes loose when they head to college, although they do end up pledging the same sorority, the best one on campus, of course. Joanne is engaged, Mary plans to escape to Europe after graduation and Kathy still hangs onto her lists, but admits to be at a loss as to where her life is going.

Fast-forward to 1974. All three women meet in New York for the first time in years on a penthouse terrace in Manhattan. Predictably grown apart, each one has changed to a point where reminiscing turns into cat fighting that turns into deeply personal blows.

The last scene of the show finds the threesome back in Texas, years later, for the funeral of Mary’s mother. As soon as Joanne walks into the funeral home her and Mary hug and make up for their years-ago falling out. Kathy walks in, the women are reunited, their bonds of friendship strong as ever.

It’s this theme of everlasting friendship through the trials of growing up that emerges as the true heart of the production, but there isn’t much originality in its exploration. The central clique emerges as a fourth character, overshadowing each of the individuals, and their personal inner lives are never fully revealed. Even chick flicks such as Clueless and Mean Girls afford their characters a chance to display their emotional development, even when it is small. Maybe Vanities should take a cue and turn away from the mirror.

Image Courtesy of ACT Theatre.