“This is my Charlie’s Angels lunch box,” Amy Seeley tells me, placing the metal box on the table between us. On its side are pictures of the two dark-haired angels battling the forces of evil–personified by two badly dressed men with awful haircuts–while the blond angel, tied to a stake, is beaming, obviously grateful to be saved by her sisters.
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For the past six weeks Seeley and Kirkland have been working on their own postfeminist action story, Beaver Hunt!, which opens this Friday night at the Factory Theater. The play is a buddy-movie parody about a pair of renegade women on the run from the law, sort of in the vein of Thelma & Louise. But Seeley takes special pains to say that her protagonists have more in common with the pair of stone-cold hit men in Pulp Fiction than the wusses played by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon. Seeley says her real inspiration comes from the ultraviolent movies of Hong Kong director John Woo. “I love his films,” she says. “Hard Target. Hard-Boiled. Hard! Hard! Hard! We have a big violent shoot-out scene in the show that’s an homage to him.”
Seeley and Kirkland first met when they were both students at the Second City Training Center. But Seeley’s memories of Second City are not fond. “Comedy is a sport, and no man wants a girl on his team,” she says. “It’s like when we were growing up and the boys played flag football in the vacant lot. They didn’t want a girl on their team. So the girls would get together and make up cheerleading routines. And in a sense that was what was expected of us when we tried to create original comedy at Second City.”
Abley and Seeley teamed up for some of the Factory’s most successful shows, including Bitches and Attack of the Killer B’s. But when it came time to work on Beaver Hunt! Seeley wanted to collaborate with Kirkland. “Jenny and I wrote Beaver Hunt! in like a pen pal way. I started it. And then we brainstormed some scene ideas, and I handed it over to Jenny, and she wrote it a little farther and then she handed it back to me.”
