Wednesday Night Save-The-World Society, The

By Pete Bauer • May 26th, 2006 • Category: Comedy

When Dee, a successful, yet lonely thirty-year-old woman places an ad in a local paper to begin a discussion group, eventually called The Wednesday Night Save-the-World Society, she sets into motion a comedic tale of varying and conflicting personalities all coming together and impacting each other’s lives forever.

The group of fellow discussion group participants includes a writer, a printer, a salesman, a struggling artist, an idealistic college student, a Goth girl and a bored, wealthy housewife. As the story unfolds you find each of these people is not what they originally appear and, through the course of their meetings, are revealed as their true selves.

The script, co-written by the directors Dave Eisenstark and Fred Burke, does a nice job of showing the differences between the person we present to the outside world and the person we truly are inside. The characters quickly project their social personas and immediate alliances and conflicts are defined, yet by the end of the story they will align themselves with each other in many surprising ways.

For the most part, the script successfully balances the wackiness of the comedy with the real drama of the characters themselves. In the end, the film is at its best in those quiet, personal moments. And through the large number of characters, it allowed the writers to present multiple sides of social and political issues without hinting their own preference for one-sided or the other.

The cast of TWNSTWS is terrific. Ruth de Sosa is wonderful as Dee, expressing an unbridled enthusiasm, yet deep loneliness at the same time. Dwight Hicks is rock-solid as the skeptical owner of a print shop who is not what he appears to be. His initial skepticism hides a greater frustration that eventually surfaces. David Grammer is wonderful as the unsuccessful and financially challenged singer/songwriter/playwright that is always on the lookout for impossibly cheap deals and breaks into his own musical numbers without warning. Other notables include Roger Ranney as the self proclaimed “Dick Head” and Mary Margaret Robinson as the bored housewife that is really struggling with issues that has left her in a precarious situation.

As I watched this talk-heavy film I was instinctively drawn to my theater background, and my instincts were right. This film was originally a play by Spare Change Productions at the Chance Theater in Anaheim, California. The film starts out pushing its intent to be wacky, but really gets its footing about a half-hour into the story when you begin to understand all of the characters.

Good writing, excellent acting and solid direction make TWNSTWS an enjoyable film.

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