When your husband comes home from a long day at work, have dinner prepared for him and always greet him at the door with a steaming plate of....
It's up to the audience to shout out the answers in Rock. Paper. Scissors.' Leave it to Cleavage, which runs on Saturday at Coquitlam's Evergreen Cultural Centre.
Vice president Diana Frances dreamed up the partly scripted comedy about two perky and repressed 1950s housewives with Ellie Harvie when the pair performed at the Outrageous Women's Cabaret at the Shadbolt Centre in 2005.
They borrowed the name, Leave it to Cleavage, from their own improv group when they used to appear at Women on Wednesdays at Punchlines.
For their show, Frances said they also incorporated tips from a 1955 Good Housekeeping magazine article, which at the time was making the rounds on the internet.The article was titled Rules for Being a Good Housewife. "I thought it was super-hilarious," Frances said, "so we created the show around being a good housewife.
"We open the show by talking to the audience, telling them the rules for being a good housewife but they have to fill in the blanks and we have to justify it and make sense of it."
The pair has performed Leave it to Cleavage about a dozen times including in a tour in 2006, which was remounted last year with a new character: a German immigrant neighbour portrayed byChristine Lipp. For its last two tour dates in Coquitlam and Maple Ridge, Frances and Harvie have also brought in a maid, played by Denise Jones."I'd love to do another tour where we add a husband," Frances quipped.
Frances said Leave it to Cleavage is "the perfect girls' night out. It's a comedy that celebrates women but doesn't take it too seriously."
Men, she said, will love the content too "because we're really taking the piss out of ourselves and our own issues around the 50s and now, and gender differences."
Leave it to Cleavage runs on Saturday, April 13 at 8 p.m. at the Evergreen Cultural Centre (1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam). Tickets are $35/$30/$15 by calling the box office at 604-927-6555 or visiting www.evergreenculturalcentre.ca.
