By Michele Markarian
“Love, Loss and What I Wore” – Written by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron. Based on the book by Ilene Beckerman. Directed by Paula Plum. Presented by Hub Theatre Company of Boston, Club Café, 209 Columbus Avenue, Boston, through August 5.
“Love, Loss and What I Wore” opens with a woman (June Kfoury) cataloging her life by drawing dresses – dresses that she’d had and loved as a girl, dresses she remembers her mother, grandmother, and aunt wearing – as a means of recording her memories. She lost her mother early in life – a theme of a few of the show’s monologues – and is turned over to her grandmother and aunt, thus losing her father as well. Somehow, she takes comfort in remembering her loved ones through their outfits.
Loss is a big part of the play, as is love, hence the title. The five women, played by Nettie Chickering, Barbara Douglass, Lauren Elias, Evelyn Holley, and Kfoury, take turns with various monologues lamenting their losses and celebrating their loves, with fashion as their throughline.
“You’d look so pretty if –“ begins one section, with each woman following the “if” with admonitions from their mothers. A mother imposing her fashion sense on her daughter is something probably every woman in the audience could relate to, along with the pithier sayings that come with Mom territory, such as “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man” (an infuriating statement I remember all too well masked as sage advice from my own mother). Fearmongering is also something Moms do, with one Mom telling her daughter that if she doesn’t do what she’s told, “…you know what will happen – you’ll get polio”. No wonder these women didn’t seem to have careers or ideas about the world at large. Trained or abandoned by their moms, they only want to feel pretty and fall in love.
That, I suppose, is what stopped me from fully enjoying the production, energetically directed by Paula Plum. While at times it was funny, with some nice movement, particularly Chickering and Holley, it didn’t really say much in the way of women’s development or evolution beyond fashion. Sure, there was a gay relationship, which was nice to see, but culminating in – what else? – a wedding. And I feel terrible saying this, as I love Nora Ephron’s essays, but I found this play to be cute but a trifle shallow. While there is a chain of influential women in my life who have left this earth, to sum them up by their outfits would be to miss the point of who they really were and what they meant to me entirely.
Nonetheless, there were some germs of truth. Chickering delivers a very funny monologue about buying a pair of Birkenstocks, and her boyfriend’s reaction to them – “He said I looked like a troll from middle earth”. There’s a whole riff on fashion that’s all too true – going to the bathroom in a jumpsuit. The folly of sleeveless turtleneck sweaters. And my favorite, “Once you start wearing Eileen Fisher, you might as well say, I give up.” Douglass delivers probably the most touching monologue in the show; when her father remarries after her mother dies, she finds her stepmother wearing the same bathrobe her mother used to wear, only in a different color. When she tells her stepmother this, the stepmother says, “oh,” and never wears it again.
Hub Theatre Company is unique in that for every show, every seat is ‘pay what you can’. This, in a time where theater tickets are not affordable to all, is a real gift to the Boston theater-going audience. So while I might not be the kind of fashionista who appreciates a verbal trunk show, you just might. For tickets and information, go to: http://www.hubtheatreboston.org/
