The cast has 90 minutes before curtain. Melinda has just learned that her abortion appointment has been canceled. Those clocks run together in Christin Eve Cato’s O.K.!, a play set in the dressing room of a regional theater in Oklahoma. One clock belongs to the show: costumes, cues, an audience waiting to be entertained. The other belongs to a person whose medical plans have been upended by the state’s ban in the play’s setting. Neither will pause for the other.
The company is touring a bilingual, off-brand parody of Oklahoma!, a musical famously full of confidence about its title place. That borrowed form gives Cato a way to put theatrical cheer next to a present-day restriction without making the subject itself a joke. Cato told American Theatre that news of Oklahoma’s abortion ban and her memory of performing “I Cain’t Say No” as a teenager fed the play. The title O.K.! can sound like reassurance. In this dressing room, reassurance is precisely what the characters cannot easily offer.
A backstage setting also keeps the question of choice among people who work together. Melinda is not alone with a headline. Her castmates have their own reactions and obligations, and the performance still has to happen. A theater company depends on coordination: somebody makes the entrance, somebody remembers the cue, somebody covers when another person falters. Cato uses that ordinary labor to make the consequences of a ban personal and collective at once. A canceled appointment changes one person’s next day; it also changes what the people around her are asked to do.
INTAR’s 2025 world premiere ran from May 10 through June 8, directed by Melissa Crespo. Crespo’s production record names performers Yadira Correa, Danaya Esperanza, Cristina Pitter and Claudia Ramos Jordán, and credits scenic designer Rodrigo Escalante, costume designer Lux Haac, lighting designer María Cristina Fusté and sound designer Daniela Hart. Those names are more than a courtesy line. A work about a company sharing a room reached audiences through another company’s choices about space, light, sound and timing. The production has ended; its premise remains a useful way to think about what policy does to a working day.
Topical theater is often praised for arriving quickly. O.K.! locates its urgency in a delay: an appointment that will not happen when planned, a decision pushed into uncertainty, a person expected to carry on while the show clock keeps moving. The parody can promise a curtain call. It cannot make the two clocks agree. That tension is why the dressing room becomes a political room, even before anyone steps onstage.