Sunday, April 07, 2013

Who are these "housewives"?

One of the things that struck me about the batch of scripts for the April 2013 Play of the Month project was that several of the scripts - including one that was chosen - had a female character described as a "housewife" in scripts set in "the present."

Who are these housewives? I don't personally know any, and I don't know of anybody who describes herself as a "housewife" - except as a euphemism for "unemployed."

And then there are the Housewives of (geographic location) reality shows. I haven't actually seen an episode but my impression is that the housewives in question are basically crass, soulless trophy wives of rich men, and they are very unlikely to perform a task normally associated with being a housewife, since they are wealthy enough to afford domestic servants.

In any case we did the script readings and those scripts were a disappointing batch - even more so than usual. There were really only two half-way decent scripts out of thirty-five submitted. We selected five. Oh well, that's show biz.


Doug Rossi and Renee Cole