Pink Flamingo is resurrecting a play about Reaganomics and prostitution.

There are vaudeville numbers, anatomy jokes, cussing and straight talk about tough subjects, but there is also warmth and sentiment in Pink Flamingo’s The Oldest Profession, about five aging prostitutes trying to hold on to their dignity and prerogative in a country that is changing under Reaganomics.

Playwright Paula Vogel is a Pulitzer Prize winner who was also the chair of Yale’s playwriting department. So it’s not a one-joke pony.

“I think there are many levels to the play,” says director Fred Bologna. “The characters have many levels. They deal with subjects probably very few people think about.”

Like?

“What happens to women who work over 50 years as a prostitute?”

Bologna says the story has origins in real life Storyville, New Orleans’ former, city-sanctioned, red-light district of the early 1900s. Bologna says it was shut down by the federal government, and many of the women relocated to New York, which serves as the setting, moved up into the 1980s of expanding corporate consolidation.

The play, a political allegory, works to employ older women who, in many professions, become increasingly scarce as they age. The five characters here—people on hard times who, having given much of themselves, are then discarded—are imbued with the humanity everybody is born with, but don’t always get.

The Oldest Profession runs 7:30pm Friday and Saturday, Aug. 25-Sept. 2, at Pink Flamingo Theater, 2115 N. Fremont Ave., Monterey. $20. 238-2399, pinkflamingotheater.org.