Making a Mockery Of It All

"This is going to be a little off-color," Betsy Colhoun warns a packed auditorium at the Ghent Playhouse.

The warning falls on avid ears.

"If you’re looking for sex and nudity," she tells the audience of mostly women, mostly

older women, "keep your eyes peeled."

And so "6 Women With Brain Death Or Expiring Minds Want To Know" opens with a note of caution and closes 15 skits later with cheers of relief and recognition.

Correctness withers with age, evidently.

And forgiveness abounds.

The show specializes in making the sad absurd. In "All My Hospitals," it’s mid-afternoon and Kathy Lee-Visscher, hilariously turned out in a pink chenille bathrobe and spongy haircurlers, sits before the TV swigging gin out of the bottle. She is watching her favorite soap, of course.

It’s interrupted as a TV character, played by Debbie McDermott, steps out of the show and into the living room, getting an outraged reception.

"I work like a dog to fill your empty life," she tells pink bathrobe, who threatens to turn her off.

"You can’t turn me off because I know why David is going to Sri Lanka," TV star declares.

In "Rambi," Nicole Corey, playing another distracted housewife, is irked because her children have too many drugs and she does not have enough.

"And they dress like hookers."

It’s not all bad, though.

"At least they’re not Republicans," one of a handful of digs writer and lyricist Mark Houston throws at the Grand Old Party.

Matters become more bizarre in "Get Proud of Me," in which Lee-Visscher, an abandoned wife in denim, talks to a head secured to a cake plate on the kitchen counter. Sally McCarthy, as the woman who lost her noggin diving down the garbage disposal to capture her prom queen crown, brightens marvelously when former wife in denim straightens the little diamond tiara on what’s left of her.

"6 Women" takes shots at Nashville, God, "Oklahoma," genuine press-on nails, Ken and Barbie, depression, The National Enquirer, game shows, politics, well, anything about women, culture and aging in the United States. And in the end, Maria Lally Clark, as another isolated woman, tells her family she’s just running out for a quart of milk, in Canada, she adds beyond their hearing, and hits the road with a lot of other women driving nowhere but away.

"6 Women" strives to offend, which turns out to be a big laugh and a bigger relief.

"6 Women With Brain Death: Or Expiring Minds Want To Know" runs at The Ghent Playhouse through April 13. For reservations, call 518-392-6264.