Collegiate Times

Cast members of "Her Sexy Outfit" rehearse prior to their performance in Haymarket Theatre.

For junior theatre arts major Alisha Saunders, the best part about creating the lead character for the theatre department's latest production, "Her Sexy Outfit," has been watching "Oprah."

Not only is Saunders playing the lead role, Lyzzie, but also plays Oprah.

"It's been an adventure, to say the least," Saunders said.

 "Her Sexy Outfit" is a modern-day adaptation of a classic Greek comedy, "Lysistrata." The women of Athens and Sparta are tired of their men always fighting in war that has raged for 21 years and go on a sex strike to try to and stop it.

One of the first scenes of the play features Oprah on her talk show convincing other women that the cause is worth backing.

"I just like the women power aspect of the play. We all have a little Lyzzie in us. I'm sure many people will call her a bitch and so and so," Saunders said. "Women are objectified all the time on stage. We might be getting objectified, but we know we're being objectified, and if that's the only way you're going to see us. We're going to work with that and turn that against you. It's working with what you have."

Daniel Zippi, a professional writer, actor and musician based out of New York City, wrote the entire script for "Her Sexy Outfit" and said the story revolves around the battle of the sexes.

"There's a general feeling of war, a general feeling of animosity between the sexes," Zippi said "The women are tired of their place and tired of being dominated by men and tired of being lead into war, which is in the backbone of the piece. The women are just tired."

To create his original script, Zippi read various versions of the original "Lysistrata" and tried to work with what he thought were the original playwright's work.  

"The plot points and the dialogue exchanges became pretty clear after reading a few different versions because they're consistent. So I just tried to contemporize them in some way," Zippi said.  "I wanted it to be a fairly tale, half that world, half our world. Bob and the performers have decided to do impersonations of contemporary figures, Bush, Clinton, Obama and Sarah Palin."

Zippi considers "Her Sexy Outfit" to be a burlesque and compared it to the political burlesque film "Dr. Strangelove."

"It's women and men just hurling these epitaphs at each other concerning each other's genitals. The battle of the sexes just evolves into name calling," Zippi said. "I don't find that stuff vulgar, personally. It's just words. Just words. It's just name calling."

Aristophanes, who wrote "Lysistrata," balanced the vulgar name calling with political messages of his time, which is what Zippi tried to capture in his script.

"Aristophanes, in my opinion, equates the war machine with the male penis. The women are just tired of being led by a penis and are tired of being objectified," Zippi said. "When women put forth ideas, men judge them on how they're dressed, and I equate that to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. There was much more coverage about how they were dressed than their ideas."

The original war machine idea was represented in "Her Sexy Outfit" in the form of a battering ram. First year master of fine arts in props design and management and props coordinator  Kathryn Anne Burnham was responsible for creating the phallic-shaped ram, which she crafted out of foam, glue, fabric and paint to finish her creation. In the show, male soldiers try to overtake a treasury with the battering ram and fail.

Burnham showed director McGrath a concept sketch, and they decided the phallus should be about the size of a coffin, or about six feet long.

"The running joke, of course, was size does matter," Burnham said.

When she created the sizeable ram, she wanted it to go along with the comedy aspect of the show.

"I cartooned it to go along with the comedy," Burnham said. "It's based on a man's circumcised penis, because that's what Americans recognize."

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