Five Women Wearing The Same Dress Character Analysis

For this play report, I read Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, by Alan Ball. I think the thing I took away from this play the most was the characterization and dialogue. I think that the design of the characters, and how they were put together and interacted with each other, helped to create a more rich plot and show clear developments. Particularly, I thought that the characters of Frances, Meredith and Trisha stood out to me as the most interesting and notable from the show. I chose to focus on these three characters, since while, for the most part, most of the characters show development throughout the play, these three show the strongest trait juxtapositions. I think that in general, especially with these three people, Ball starts out

Meredith is shown, in the beginning, as a stereotypical tomboy, rebellious, social-justice-warrior kind of character. The readers see that she is a wound-up-tight, angry person, but we don’t really see why. We don’t, that is, until she reveals her dark and sad past, as she tells her fellow bridesmaids about how she had sex with a much older man when she was in middle school, and how crestfallen and traumatized she was and still is after he broke her heart. She also reveals how she got high and drunk for the first time when she was very young. By seeing Meredith’s dark and sad childhood, the readers are able to see why she is the way she is - an irate, rebellious woman who, inside, is scared of the world. Meredith is not just her punk exterior, and by juxtaposing her archetypal exterior and softer, more traumatized character, Ball again demonstrates to the readers how she is more than just the few traits that we see in the beginning. I like how Meredith shows that a person’s past affects not only how they feel, but then how they present themselves to the world - perhaps if Meredith had not gone through what she went through as a child, she wouldn’t be the rebellious, angry character that she is in the play. I think that, of all the characters, Meredith shows the strongest difference between her external and internal