Despite what some "cancelled" alarmists would have you believe, comedy has always been about understanding where the lines are, when to cross them, and when not to. After decades of satirizing the local and national socio-political landscape in its summer shows, Salt Lake Acting Company seems to understand how to navigate that tricky terrain.

The 2025 incarnation of the SLAC summer show—The Secret Lives of the Real Wives of the Salt Lake Hive—takes as its foundation the popular Utah-set reality shows The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. But according to the show's head writer, Austin Archer, that doesn't mean a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel approach to mocking its subjects.

"The thing we want to be careful about as a writing team is always, you never want to be punching down," Archer says. "I think it could be really easy for me, as a straight, white cisgender man, being like, 'Aren't all these ladies on these reality TV shows just so much?' ... I do think that the shots we wind up taking at the culture around the women in these circles is mostly in good fun, and I think we also wind up being pretty respectful regarding what they've built—the fact that they are entrepreneurs, and they run businesses."

Cynthia Fleming—Salt Lake Acting Company's artistic director, who also directed this production—adds, "I was very mindful of, 'how do you portray something that's already so heightened.' I'm not a reality TV watcher, but for research, I was paid to watch The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The first three episodes it was kind of tough to get into, but then towards the end, I am into these women. I understand them. I relate to them. And we are portraying them as real, because they are real women; they're not a parody of themselves."

Archer—a popular social-media content creator raised in Utah but currently based in Los Angeles—also believes that he has gotten a unique perspective on how to approach the quirky absurdities of Utah culture by virtue of being the token Utahn in his social circles.

"The whole time I was living in New York City, I had friends from all over the world," Archer says. "Every time I would tell people I was from Salt Lake City, people would be, 'What's that like?' There was this curiosity about this really weird place; out of all the places in the United States, that state was fascinating to so many of my friends. So I got really used to trying to explain my home state and my home city to people from the outside."

There are always complicated choices to be made regarding what to include in the script, and how to include it—especially as news is always breaking while the show is in the works. Archer describes it as "like writing Saturday Night Live, where they have a show that they're building on Wednesday, and it's a completely different show by Saturday, because something happens Saturday morning that they've got to work into Weekend Update." Fleming compliments Archer, for example, not just for being able to include the late-breaking "break-up" between Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the script, but doing so in a way that runs throughout the show. When it came to Sen. Mike Lee's tasteless social-media posts regarding political assassinations in Minnesota, on the other hand—well, there are things that just aren't meant to be made funny.

The musical parody format of the show—written by Archer, previous SLAC Summer Show head writer Olivia Custodio and lyricist Penelope Caywood—does, however, allow for a lot of latitude in finding release valves for the frustrations of the show's likely-mostly-progressive audience. In 2025, according to Archer, finding ways to provide that catharsis is both tricky and necessary.

"Cabaret came up while we were writing this," he says. "It feels very much right now in the arts like we're living out that show: There are these performers just trying to put on a fun, escapist cabaret for people, in a situation where outside, nothing is normal. ... And they're trying to walk that line of, 'Is it ethical for us to be trying to present this escapism, or should we just be saying, everybody, we need to be sounding the alarms and doing more?'

"In the first 100 days of this second administration," Archer adds, "it was really obvious that, you know, a lighter satirical touch doesn't really get the job done now. With some of this stuff, you need to hit a little harder, because people are feeling it harder. So there's some swings we took with this script, that I went to Cynthia and she said, 'Yeah, I think that we need to be able to go there, as the company that does this show.' We take a few swings that I think are necessary in this moment to drive home that we're aware of what's happening outside of the theater."