Daily Californian Review by By Grace Culhane

When local director Zara Benner chose the 1993 comedy “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress” for her winter staged reading, she had a tremendous script to vivify. Written by Oscar and Emmy-winning screenwriter Alan Ball (“American Beauty,” “Six Feet Under”), “Five Women” veers back and forth from playful to tragic, providing rich material for the small, almost exclusively female cast.