O S Ouht Epero

SC 38th Season • 366th Production SECOND STAGE / SEPTEMBER 18 THROUGH OCTOBER 21, 2001 So u h o t eper o David Emmes Martin Benson Producing Artistic Director Artistic Director presents the World Premiere of by ANNIE WEISMAN Scenic Design Costume Design Lighting Design Sound Design CHRISTOPHER ACEBO JOYCE KIM LEE GEOFF KORF ARAM ARSLANIAN Dramaturg Stage Manager Production Manager JEFF GIFFORD *EDWARD TIGHE JERRY PATCH Directed by MARK RUCKER SUE AND RALPH STERN, Honorary Producers Hold Please was commissioned and developed by South Coast Repertory PERFORMING ARTS NETWORK / SOUTH COAST REPERTORY P -1 CAST OF CHARACTERS (in order of speaking) Erika ..................................................................... *Tessa Auberjonois Agatha ................................................................... *Kimberly K. King Jessica ........................................................................... *Jillian Bach Grace ...................................................................... *Linda Gehringer SETTING: An office. LENGTH: Approximately 2 hours, including one 15-minute intermission PRODUCTION STAFF Casting Director ........................................................................... Joanne DeNaut Production Assistant .................................................................... Christi Vadovic Assistant to the Set Designer ................................................. Celeste Thompson Stage Management Intern ............................................................... Emily Caster ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Sonny Whang and the Secretaries at Phillips Nizer, LLP Cellular phones, beepers and watch alarms should be turned off or set to non-audible mode during the performance. Please refrain from unwrapping candy or making other noises that may disturb surrounding patrons. The use of cameras and recorders in the theatre is prohibited. Smoking is not permitted anywhere in the theatre. * Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers. Official Airline Media Partner P - 2 SOUTH COAST REPERTORY / PERFORMING ARTS NETWORK Women at Work ost of us don’t have mothers who blazed a trail for us transformed offices and provided new opportunities for M— at least, not all the way. Coming of age before or women. In 1879, Mary Foot Seymour opened the first typing during the inception of the women’s movement, whether as school for women, who learned a skill that gave them access working parents or homemakers, whether married or di- to male-dominated clerical jobs. Women moved rapidly into vorced, our mothers faced conundrums — what should they office positions until by 1900 more than 75 percent of all be? how should they act? – that became our uncertainties. clerical workers were female—up from just three percent in — Anne Roiphe, Raising Daughters 1870. Both the typist and her machine were called “typewrit- en must work, and women must weep.” ers,” and because this was something quite new, M — Charles Kingsley, The Three Fishers women with typing skills could not be accused of displacing men from their desks. Since offices were omen’s art, though created in solitude, perceived as clean, safe working environments, Wwells up out of community. There is, middle-class high school graduates saw the roles of clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being typewriter, bookkeeper, and clerk as preferable to diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting being a factory girl. through the coercive choicelessness of the system on –Juliet H. Mofford, “Women in the whose boundaries we are working.” Workplace,” Women’s History — Adrienne Rich ow deep is our desire to do he invention of the first practical “mechanical writ- Hbetter than our mothers— Ting machine” in 1867, which was put on the market to bring daughters into adult- in 1874 by E. Remington & Sons as a “Type Writer,” hood strong and fierce yet loving and gen- tle, adventurous 29. Working Girls and competitive but still nurturing The working girls in the morning are going to work—long and friendly, sweet lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores and yet sharp. We know as working factories, thousands with little brick-shaped lunches women that we can’t quite have it wrapped in newspapers under their arms. all, but that hasn’t stopped us from Each morning as I move through this river of young-woman wanting it all for them.” life I feel a wonder about where it is all going, so — Roiphe, Raising Daughters many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of come home in the morning dances the night before and plays and walks. Ilight Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and so here My mother says when you are always the others, those who have been over the way, gonna the women who know each one the end of life’s gamble live your life right for her, the meaning and the clew, the how and the way Oh mother dear we’re not the of the dances and the arms that passed around their waists fortunate ones and the fingers that played in their hair. And girls just want to have fun. Faces go by written over: “I know it all, I know where the bloom When the working day is done and the laughter go and I have memories,” and the feet Girls – they just want to have of these move slower and they have wisdom where fun. the others have beauty. —from “Girls Just Want So the green and the gray move in the early morning on the to Have Fun” by Robert Hazard; downtown streets. performed by Cyndi Lauper —Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems PERFORMING ARTS NETWORK / SOUTH COAST REPERTORY P - 3 Dispatches From the Front (Office) eela Banerjee, writing in the Business Day section “Many of the things these women do would not be as inap- of the August 10, 2001, New York Times, reports on propriate in a man,” the program’s director, Jean Hol- Na Mountain View, California, women’s support lands, said. “We want these women to be more powerful group which meets the first Thursday of and not feel more victimized, thinking ‘We don’t get the every month. They sit in a circle and same consideration men do.’ We don’t. So what? We’ve confess: only been in the work force as leaders for 50 years. Men “I’m Suzann, and I’m a re- have a 600-year head start on us.” covering bully broad…or maybe a relapsing one.” ❏ ❏ ❏ “I came here—excuse me, I was sent here—because n “Big Brother’s Corporate Cousin,” an essay in the Au- of my intolerance for incom- Igust 6-13, 2001, issue of The Nation, writer Christian petence, and for having a Parenti describes the ways in which technology has al- passion for my job that lowed corporate America greater surveillance over its em- scared people to death.” ployees that has in turn raised expectations, productivity, Sounds like an AA and employee oppression. meeting. But these The American Management Association reports that women are raging suc- 80 percent of US corporations keep their employees under cesses, with six figure regular surveillance: bag and body searches of retail em- incomes earned in key ployees; computerized ordering in restaurants, and moni- executive positions. toring of e-mail and phone traffic. Their tough, no- Employees have been pitched the idea that technol- nonsense ways ogy is freeing workers and flattening supervisorial hierar- have intimidated chies, but electronic surveillance also allows supervisors their subordi- to harass or fire employees they believe are under-achiev- nates, col- ing. Employees involved in workplace reform are at even leagues, and greater peril. bosses, and One software program, the market leader, allows brought managers to listen in on calls, archive all e-mail and voice them to Bul- traffic, and oversee all communications according to key ly Broads, words. It might point up hints of theft or drug use, preg- an executive coaching nancy or union organizing. program. The system also allows managers to measure and It advises them rank their staff, thereby putting competitive pressure on to achieve even more those ranked lower in the hierarchy. Telephonic support by going back to being personnel are ranked by calls handled per hour, and mini- ladies. No more ’80s mum levels raised as a result; nurses have had their activist stances. caseloads increased by one-third. Learn to pause, be Not that there isn’t some need for reform. One thoughtful — stam- study found that 30-40 percent of all workplace web surf- mer even — cry, but talk ing isn’t job-related. seventy percent of all online pornog- calmly through the tears. raphy traffic takes place between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. A 45- Nearly all the group’s minute lingerie show held on a Victoria’s Secret website 17 members were sent be- cost American firms an estimated $120 million in lost em- cause of their intimidating ployee work time. management styles. —Jerry Patch P - 4 SOUTH COAST REPERTORY / PERFORMING ARTS NETWORK TESSA AUBERJONOIS JILLIAN BACH LINDA GEHRINGER Erika Jessica Grace Artist Biographies *TESSA AUBERJONOIS (Erika) *JILLIAN BACH (Jessica) made her and as Helen Gahagan Douglas in But made her SCR debut in last season’s SCR debut this summer in the Pacific Not for Me. She was recently seen in opener Everett Beekin. She has ap- Playwrights Festival reading of Hold the world premiere of Annie Weisman’s peared Off-Broadway in Trainspotting Please. Regional theatre credits in- first play, Be Aggressive, at La Jolla at the Players Theatre, Killers and clude The Seagull at Victory Gardens, Playhouse where she also performed in Other Family at the Rattlestick and The Miser at Trinity Repertory, Speed Light Up the Sky. Ms. Gehringer has Uncommon Women & Others at the Lu- of Darkness at Alias Stage, The Mer- worked at the Mark Taper Forum, The cille Lortel. Her regional theatre cred- chant of Venice at Shakespeare & Com- Area, Boston’s Huntington Theatre, its include The Country Wife and pany, Hot N’ Throbbing for Paula Vogel The Guthrie Theater, the Berkshire Camino Real at the Shakespeare The- and The Misanthrope and The Country Theatre Festival, New York Stage and atre in Washington D.C., Hay Fever Wife at American Players Theatre.

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