A People You Know Production

Directed by Loulou Sloss and Piper Richardson

Produced by Morgan Zoia

Written by Loulous Sloss

Reviewed by Callisto Lodwick

A student, a personal assistant, and a recent divorcee walk into a Brazilian waxing salon. It sounds like the set up to a joke (and in a way, it is), but is instead the premise of Loulou Sloss’ new play, Legs Up, produced by vanguards of the avant-garde, People You Know Productions. The audience follows three women’s lives through the medium of their monthly waxing appointments—how they change, how they grow, and what their opinions of having someone rip hair off of their genitals are.

‘I grew up with the idea that getting waxed was the only way to go about your life—growing up, everyone did it,’ explains Sloss with wide-eyed enthusiasm. ‘It was only when I came to university I realized the phenomenon of getting waxed isn’t universal—instead, it’s really fascinating.’ Indeed, much of the play’s humour comes from the ways the three characters—Sam, a counter-cultural NYU student (Sofia Hattiangadi); Trish, the no-nonsense business woman of a high-flying CEO (Daisy Paterson); and Jenny, a middle-aged divorcee desperate for fresh love (Nicole Sellew)—interact with their long suffering waxer Regina (Scarlett Tew). There is a particularly funny gag in which Paterson’s Trish doesn’t even pause her endless phone calls to shrug off her skirt (Regina does that for her) or wince as her hair is ripped off. Jenny veers closer to cringeworthy in her aggressively friendly (and uncomfortably one-sided) interactions with Regina as she rattles off recent traumas in her personal life, and Sam is winsomely endearing, recasting Regina as a mother figure to steer her away from the pitfalls of shaving off your eyebrows to impress your friends.

Trish (Daisy Paterson) is far too busy to take off her own clothes. Credit: Emma Dalton

Most touching of all is Regina herself, who is never truly permitted to be an individual during her appointments: instead, she is forced to mould to whatever her clients demand of her. ‘The way we treat people who do things like cut hair, paint nails, or perform other spa treatments is kind of abominable,’ Sloss says. ‘It’s kind of weird how people go to get waxed and don’t actually discuss the process we’re undergoing: instead we talk about other things, and start to treat the waxer like our therapist—something they’re obviously not paid to do. Hopefully people will leave the play with a more empathetic view of waxing and waxers’. Tew does a wonderful job of portraying a character who balances the unique demands of the job with her own blend of physical humour, aided by the clever costume design—actors wear skin coloured tights with “hair” velcroed to their legs, which Tew rips off as they scream, wince, or hold it in. Regina only actually gets to speak for herself at the play’s conclusion in a rather basic monologue about how her clients never truly see her—a message the audience has already absorbed, as some of the sweetest moments in the play are Regina’s mannerisms and comments during the scant moments when she is able to be alone.

Regina (Scarlett Tew)’s comments on her books are a lovely running gag. Credit: Emma Dalton

Much of the strength of the play is in the acting and direction: a natural result of the brevity of a play that gives characters such a limited numbers of lines. The action of actors putting their legs up and talking so comfortably through it is initially jarring, but the audience soon gets as used to it as the characters themselves are (it helps that the first client to enter is getting her first ever bikini wax, which allows the audience to feel her discomfort as they are introduced to their own strange experience). Each of the following women are truly unique to the point of caricature—but I appreciated that they don’t all reach a “happy” or “moral” ending. The moments the play does try to directly preach about the importance of loving yourself are by far its weakest: the audience can already see that in the interactions between characters and the way they go about their lives, and I was glad that moralising section was mostly confined to the mother-daughter angle and then immediately dropped. Most revealing is instead the way characters cope with pain, which is paralleled in their personal lives and their reactions in the waxing salon: much of the journey is about ‘coming to terms with the fact that pain and vulnerability is okay’, says Sloss. Director Piper Richardson agrees: ‘directing this was a really unique opportunity to figure out how the women react to being waxed in their own specific way; in other words, how they cope deal with pain’.

Legs Up is performed in the Bell Pettigrew museum, a tucked away space in the Bute Building filled floor to ceiling with skeletons and slightly off-putting taxidermy. The idea of hosting a play in such a unique space was first floated around during production of the sex-themed monologue collection A Girl Gets Naked in This: the idea is that the uncanny exhibition increases the sense of characters being put on display. This cold feeling still remains in Legs Up, but now the focus is on the unnaturally perfect, manicured state of the animals: they radiate an uneasy, judging miasma that one imagines permeates a first-time visitor’s impression of a waxing salon. The effect is slightly dampened by the plethora of carpets laid on the floor, both for the audience to sit on and to reduce echo, but I still felt suitably off-put when I was reminded the grinning ox skeleton to my right side. Set dressing is made even more clinical thanks to donations from the School of Medicine: the rubber gloves and paper table covers are authentically clinical.

As a woman who has never set foot in a wax salon, Legs Up was a humorous glimpse into another world. For those who visit regularly, it is a chance to see a contorted version of their own lives reflected back at them, and a reminder of the humanity of those who provide these treatments. While the plot itself is a little thin and predictable, the absurd comedy is piled high, casting light on a practice that can be normalised, demonised, or ridiculed. Physical comedy and character acting remains strong throughout, and it is the individual portrayals of characters, from the sensitive to the caricature, that will really stick with audiences—we feel for them even as they stick their legs up.