Please join the “Getting Real” working group for a Zoom discussion with the team behind Beverly Hill, on Friday, February 18, 4:30 – 6:00 PM.

We are delighted to welcome the team behind the puppet comedy series Beverly Hill. Beverly Hill, created by Marissa Fenley (UChicago, PhD Candidate in English and TAPS) and Madeline Mahrer (playwright and screenwriter, MFA, UCLA), explores the dynamics of rich housewifery by forcing it to adjust to a post-capitalist world. The team will be sharing their process and current stage of development with our working group; you can find more information on their project below. We look forward to discussing wigs, identity, and rich-bitch puppets with you all!

BEVERLY HILL

Wealthy White Women seem to be everywhere in popular culture from Desperate Housewives, to Big Little Lies, to the 10-years-and-running Real Housewives franchise. But what would happen to these monied women if they lost all means of currency? Our puppet comedy series, Beverly Hill, explores the dynamics of rich housewifery by forcing it to adjust to a post-capitalist world. This half hour pilot episode, which gestures towards a longer series, takes place after a global economic revolution and follows six formerly rich bitches—each represented by a 15” rod puppet— as they struggle to maintain their sense of self in a world that has left them behind. The six housewives now live together in a mansion on Beverly Hill, the last hill left standing in the one-time playground of the rich and famous. For the housewives, Beverly Hill is a safe haven from the revolutionaries who brought about the end of capitalism and their own personal apocalypse. To the rest of the world, Beverly Hill is a trash heap, and its mysterious mansion dwellers, delusional shut-ins who refuse to acclimate to a new world order without wealth gaps.

As we follow our six squaterettes—occupying a luxury home is a right and a privilege—throughout the episode, we learn about how they have managed to reconstruct modes of capital accumulation amongst themselves, a patriarchal hierarchy to which they subject themselves and each other in order to preserve the symbolic order of wifeliness, and fictional genealogies of Whiteness past, those storied lineages that whisper hereditary promises of restoring the housewives to their conditional roles of power. The show explores numerous inconsistencies built into the women’s identities, now exposed by the absence of an externally maintained system of wealth.