Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming playwright Judy Klass with her one-act play “Take Down.” A movie producer, Ada, and an aging female action star, Joan, are interviewing a young male starlet, Farley, for their newest blockbuster film. “The three characters take a meeting in an alternate universe in which women have most positions of power, and the movie industry is a mirror image, in terms of gender politics, of the one we live in. The way the characters think, and carry themselves, and their body language should reflect this different world. The women are not “cougars” or vamps showing off cleavage—as older men who run Hollywood in our universe do not walk around in Speedos, etc. In this universe, it is not the job of women to be sexy or decorative.” Farley is demure and deferential while the women are gracious and accommodating. The women warn Farley about the female director, who has some “weird ideas, like, for example, your character would help Joan’s character, Helga, fight Wild Annie and defend the President. I mean, we have an in-house studio policy that when the female lead is saving the world… the love interest is there to be a love interest.” The absurdity of the situation and the arbitrariness of power make us question our own system, where men like Harvey Weinstein can hold sway and dominate women of great talent and impeccable education and plots are built on the assumption that men are worth more than women. Judy’s writing is hilarious, full of zingers, but it is also as unflinching as steel. Our system is a broken one which devalues humanity and replays worn-out tropes. Surely we have the imagination to demand change?
Experience Judy’s entertaining and revealing play in Synkroniciti’s “Wild” issue: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Judy Klass started out in the NYC/New Jersey area, but wandered off to Nashville, thinking she’d write country songs… She teaches at Vanderbilt University. Eight of her full-length plays have been produced onstage. Full-lengths of hers have won the Dorothy Silver Award and the SOPS competition. Two of her full-length plays are published: Cell by Samuel French/Concord and After Tartuffe by Next Stage Press. Two of her full-lengths and six one-acts have been produced as podcasts. Thirty-nine of her one-act plays have been produced onstage, many with multiple US productions. A few have been produced in the UK, Ireland and Canada.
Judy also writes screenplays… and minor brushes with Hollywood led to “Take Down.”