Real women not only have curves, they join forces to bring audiences a female-fueled revival of Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves, a Garry Marshall Theatre crowd-pleaser if there ever was one.

 López’s 1990 comedy lets us be flies on the walls of a small East L.A. dress-making factory whose five seamstresses struggle to meet a seemingly impossible deadline as the enterprise’s futuro—and theirs as well—rests on their ability to complete a hundred dresses between Monday and Friday of a single, life-changing week.

 Standing in for López’s younger self is eighteen-year-old Ana (López look-alike Julianna Stephanie Ojeda), fresh out of high school and bubbling with a desire to study creative writing at NYU, a dream that might actually come true if only she could earn more than a meager 278 dolares a week.

In the meantime, there is trabajo to be done, most immediately the cutting and sewing of more than eight-dozen Bloomingdales-bound evening gowns too pricey for Ana and her fellow dressmakers to even think about buying and too small for any of them to fit into.

 Making the work even more pressing is the very real posibilidad that the factory owned by Ana’s sister Estela (Sherry Mandujano) will have to close its doors if bills are not paid in full, thereby signaling an end to the ladies’ below-minimum-wage jobs.

Not that any of them have seen a paycheck in recent weeks, nor do they seem likely to see one any time soon.

 As if this weren’t already bastante, there’s also ICE to watch out for since, unlike Ana’s legal (and possibly yet again pregnant) mother Carmen (Blanca Araceli), the diet-crazed Rosalí (Claudia Duran), the still unhappily childless Pancha (Jackie Garcia), and Ana herself, Estela remains an undocumented worker, i.e. an “illegal alien” as far as the La Migra is concerned.

Like the Geffen Playhouse’s Skeleton Crew, the Mark Taper Forum’s Sweat, and IAMA Theatre Company’s American Hero, Real Women Have Curves gets us rooting for a cast of characters who fall near the bottom of the 99%.

 Unlike those recent L.A. theater hits, however, López’s play focuses specifically on those being demonized by draconian anti-immigration laws and a country where el racismo thrives stronger than ever amongst those who see its protagonists as “the other,” and in so doing reveals how very alike we all are regardless of country of origin, language of birth, and weight of choice,.

Playwright López has tweaked her nearly four-decade-old play to bring it up to date from its original 1987 time-frame into the 21st Century.

In addition, despite ongoing immigration issues that make these women’s struggles every bit as real as their curves, López manages to turn their very serious dilemmas into the stuff of comedy, the proverbial spoonful of azûcar helping la medicina go down.

Director Mary Jo DuPrey gives each Real Woman her moment to shine, from UCI grad Ojeda’s peppy, heartfelt Ana to Araceli’s still feisty-at-fifty Carmen to Mandujano’s valiantly struggling Estela to Garcia’s tough-talking grouch of a Pancha to Duran’s food-and-self-esteem-starved Rosalí.

 Scenic designer Tanya Orellana and properties designer Sydney Russell have joined forces to create an authentic-looking dress factory down to its smallest detail, and the costumes Jessica Champagne-Hansen has given each character reflect to perfection just who they are and where they’re from.

Karyn D. Lawrence’s appropriately realistic lighting design takes gorgeous Technicolor flight during scene changes underscored by Corinne Carrillo’s salsarrifico sound design.

 Completing Real Women Have Curves’ 100%-female creative team are dramaturg Katherine Nigh, production stage manager Giselle N. Vega, casting director Jami Rudofsky, and understudies Ariella Fiore and Marlene Luna.

Productions of Terrence McNally’s Master Class and Neil Simon’s Laughter On The 23rd Floor got the reconceived, refurbished, rechristened Garry Marshall Theatre off to a bang-up start last year, and if Real Women Have Curves is any indication of things to come, Season Two looks to be every bit as excitante as the first.

Garry Marshall Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank.
www.GarryMarshallTheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
October 12, 2018
Photos: Chelsea Sutton

Tags: Garry Marshall Theatre, Josefina López, Los Angeles Theater Review