A radical depiction of unconventional motherhood is on the way. A press release has announced that Christina Hendricks (“Mad Men”), Alysia Reiner (“Orange Is the New Black”), and Anna Camp (“Pitch Perfect”) have signed on to star in “Egg,” a dark comedy “about why we choose motherhood, why we revere it, fear it, or delegate it, and why some of us choose to forgo it.” The female-led story, which hails from indie production company Over. Easy., will be written by best-selling author Risa Mickenberg and directed by “GLOW” star Marianna Palka.
The story centers on Tina (Reiner), an audacious conceptual artist — is there any other kind? — who, along with her “passive-aggressive feminist husband” Wayne (Gbenga Akinnagbe, “The Deuce”) invites her “eight-month pregnant art school rival (Hendricks) and power-hungry, new money husband Don (David Alan Basche, ‘Equity’) to their loft in the Bronx for dinner,” the official synopsis details. The pair plan to surprise their visitors with Tina’s new work-in-progress — “a radical alternative to motherhood. But when Tina and Wayne’s non-traditional surrogate Kiki (Camp) arrives in short shorts, the truth [comes out] and the patriarchy fights to hang on to its teeth.”
Produced by Reiner, Basche, and Michele Ganeless, former President of Comedy Central, the pic is scheduled to shoot later this summer in New York.
“We are thrilled to throw another stone at the glass ceiling of Hollywood, by hiring more women than men, while telling this darkly comic stereotype-breaking story about parenthood,” said Reiner.
Palka made her directorial debut with 2008’s “Good Dick,” a comedy about a lonely woman (Palka) and the video store clerk (Jason Ritter, “Parenthood”) trying to impress her. Her most recent film, “Bitch,” debuted at Sundance earlier this year. The feminist comedy stars Palka as a mother of four children who discovers her husband is cheating on her. “She can’t kill herself, so she finds another solution by living as a dog in the family basement,” Palka explained to us.
When we asked her what she’d like people to think about after watching “Bitch,” she said, “That healed people heal people. That woman deserve all of their civil and human rights. That no one needs to use the term ‘bitch’ against anyone else, unless they’re literally talking about a female dog. Because no one is actually that term. So let’s find a better word,” she urged.
Palka produced Lucy Walker’s Oscar short-listed, Emmy Award-nominated “The Lion’s Mouth Opens.” She’s also the subject of the doc short, which sees the Scottish multi-hyphenate confronting the possibility of having Huntington’s Disease.
