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The chicks in chains were making a break for the prison wall when I stopped by the Santa Fe Playhouse to see why all those sirens were going off. These babes behind bars were involved with some sordid shenanigans, let me tell you.
In the span of 90 minutes, some of them experienced a lobotomy, physical degradation of the worst kind (not that there's a best kind of that sort of thing), drug use, profanity galore and, of course, lesbianism - lots of lesbianism. The jailbreak was unsuccessful, by the way, so the Women Behind Bars remained just that: behind bars.
Women Behind Bars is Tom Eyen's 1974 play that pays homage to those not-so-wonderful women-in-prison films. Marcus Vaughter is
the warden, that is, the producer-director of this production, which opened June 12 and runs through June 29 at the Santa Fe Playhouse on De Vargas Street. If you go, bring a file in case you want to bust out.
Set in the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, Women Behind Bars plays like a B movie from that era, only with the sexual standards of a 1970s exploitation film. The girls even have a shower scene, which I couldn't see in rehearsal because, as the girls explained to me, there's a water shortage going around.
Eyen, a native of Cambridge, Ohio, who later attended the American Academy of American Arts in New York City, was an incredibly prolific writer, turning out a series of seemingly nonstop spoof plays with intriguing titles like Lana Got Laid in Lebanon, Why Hannah's Skirt Won't Stay Down and The Dirtiest Show in Town (a takeoff on Oh
Calcutta!). Eyen, who died in 1991, may be best-known for writing the book and lyrics to the Broadway hit Dreamgirls, or for his scripts for the cult television series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
Women Behind Bars opened off-off-Broadway in the autumn of 1974 and moved its way up to off-Broadway by the spring of...