However, the Christchurch earthquake on February 22 turned the plans upside down.
"We could see in our schedule that we could rehearse it here for four weeks prior, but we hadn't budgeted to produce the show because the Court Theatre was going to do it, so we put in a special application to Creative New Zealand and luckily for us they were supportive of collaboration - and particularly this one - and gave us the money to build the show," she said.
The original crew from the Court were available and four have come to Dunedin to work on the show. It opens here tomorrow for a three-week season as originally scheduled, then goes to the Aurora Centre in Christchurch for two weeks.
Part of the rationale for the collaboration is for staff to share skills and talents, according to theatre general manager Jeremy Smith.
It's a valuable opportunity that doesn't arise often for theatre crews and something they plan to continue as timetabling allows, he said.
Macgregor was relieved to find all the original cast were still available to do it with the changed dates, even though it meant less work for them with the reduced Christchurch season in the enormous Aurora Centre.
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress was written by Alan Ball almost 20 years ago and led to his working as a screenwriter for such films as the Academy award-winning satirical American Beauty and television comedy series like the quirky Six Feet Under and True Blood.
Macgregor says since she started rehearsing, she has come to respect Ball's writing more and more.
"I think there are some plays that read better off the page than others - some you really need to see on their feet and to have the voices of the actors behind them. There's not a lot to imagine when reading this play, whereas some plays you can allow your imagination to go really wild as to where you are going to set it and how it's going to be done.
"With this, there's not a huge amount of creative licence you can take to err away from what's there.
"Once I started working on it with the actors there, it's grown on me a lot. It's lots of fun, and when you grew up in the '80s, you can really appreciate all the bad decisions going on in it - bad dresses, bad hair, bad make-up - looking back on it, but of course we all embraced it - things like crimping our hair and listening to Cindi Lauper."
In the play, five bridesmaids, all wearing identical bright blue dresses with puffy sleeves, escape from an overdone wedding reception and take refuge in a floral bedroom in a big old mansion in Knoxville, Tennessee.
They share secrets and stories and wonder why they have been chosen by Tracy, the bride, with whom they have nothing in common, Macgregor said.
"They haven't had a friendship with the bride for years, yet they are all in her wedding party. As they get halfway through the play they realise that actually Tracy doesn't have any friends."There are underlying themes of friendship and dysfunctional families, she said.
It takes place in the bedroom of Meredith, rebellious younger sister of the bride who has a poster of Malcolm X, the African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist of the 1950s and '60s, on the wall.
The other bridesmaids are Frances, an inexperienced, religious young girl, the dorky cousin of Meredith and the bride; the world-weary Trisha, who used to be best friends with the bride, and, having slept with numerous men, is bitter about love but actually falls in love again at the wedding;
Mindy, the groom's lesbian sister whose partner of seven years has not been invited to the wedding; and Georgeanne, a frustrated wife with an uninterested husband and all sorts of problems who obsesses about the most inappropriate people, according to Macgregor.
"She's very involved with her own relationship pain but very funny as well."
Tripp Davenport, with whom Trisha has fallen in love at the wedding, is the token male. In a few short, delicately written pages he gets to turn her bitter view of love around, Macgregor said.
"There's a key character we never meet called Tommy Valentine who's slept with all of them, or come on to all of them at one point, and he's at the wedding.
"He's the funny thread that brings all their pasts into the room and we find out what a cad he is."
There's also a dark undertone, although it doesn't override the piece, when Meredith reveals the experience she had with Tommy Valentine when she was only 12.
She justifies it because she was in love with him, but the others realise how inappropriate it was, Macgregor says.
In typical wealthy southern US style, the women have all been to charm school and "come out" at a debutante ball.
"Even Mindy the lesbian character talks about going to Miss Amelia's charm school and how she learnt to walk properly.
"She looks a million bucks, not a clichéd lesbian character. She's the epitome of Southern upbringing and training and yet she's quite open about her sexuality, which is refreshing," she said.
"There's a lot of reference to mothers in this, and not in a particularly glowing light.
"You get the feeling, though you never meet the mothers, of what kind of upbringing these girls must have had and the pressure to conform, but here in the bedroom they can say and do and be what they really are, not what that society expects of them."
Catch it
Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, by Alan Ball, opens at the Fortune Theatre tomorrow and plays until June 25. Directed by Lara Macgregor, it features Kathleen Burns, Kate Prior, Lizzie Tollemache, Serena Cotton, Claire Dougan and Jonathan Martin, with design by Peter King and costumes by Deborah Ward.
