{"id":3476,"date":"2012-11-18T22:48:28","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T03:48:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3476"},"modified":"2012-12-02T00:09:21","modified_gmt":"2012-12-02T05:09:21","slug":"lives-through-clothes-love-loss-and-what-i-wore-at-fpct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3476","title":{"rendered":"Lives Through Clothes: Love, Loss and What I Wore at FPCT"},"content":{"rendered":"

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L to R: Kate McKenna, Beverly Shannon, Andrea Bush, Anne Shoemaker, Helenmary Ball<\/p><\/div>\n

Lives Through Clothes: Love, Loss<\/em> at FPCT<\/h2>\n

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com November 18, 2012<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes there are shows you\u2019d like to like more. Nora and Delia Ephron\u2019s 2009 show Love, Loss and What I Wore<\/em>, now gracing the Fells Point Corner Theatre\u2019s downstairs stage, is a case in point. I don\u2019t know much about Delia Ephron\u2019s work, but I adored her late sister Nora. I was hoping for bright flashes of Nora\u2019s mordant wit, but it\u2019s not quite that kind of show. Nor is it exactly a dramatization of Ilene Beckerman\u2019s faintly-poignant-despite-the-stoicism 2005 autobiography-told-through-clothes of the same title. Instead, it is Beckerman\u2019s book plus the gleanings of 100 e-mail questionnaires the Ephrons sent out to female friends about their lives with clothes, and little of it bears the stamp of the Ephron wit.<\/p>\n

The theater piece (it can\u2019t exactly be called a play) thus becomes a series of monologues, choral spoken pieces, and a few dialogues, articulating the collective encounter between women\u2019s lives and clothes. The humor, such as it is, lies in the shock of recognition some of the comments are at least intended to evoke. I found it pretty weak, with the conclusions of the skits often being obvious from the first word. Take, for example, the moment where all five of the performers stand in front of imaginary closets, noting in frustration that with all the garments inside, they feel as if they have nothing to wear. What are the odds, with all that frustration and negativity, that they\u2019re going to find anything by the end? And even if, like me, you\u2019d heard next to nothing about the show in advance, how surprising would it be that they\u2019d have a segment on the entropy that inevitably overtakes the contents of a purse, or one on the embarrassing and frustrating time one has shopping for a bra?<\/p>\n

Even the tentpole of the show, Beckerman\u2019s contribution, a series of episodes telling the history of \u201cGingy\u201d (Beckerman\u2019s nickname), illustrated with Beckerman\u2019s minimalist drawings, are so restrained as to resonate very little. And the show doesn\u2019t do much to make it resonate. All the details Gingy shares (street addresses in New York, names of clothing stores, descriptions of the fabric) had better already mean something to you, because the show isn\u2019t going to supply much additional context.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that there\u2019s anything wrong with Love, Loss<\/em>; it\u2019s just that there isn\u2019t enough right with it.<\/p>\n

Which is not the fault of the performers. The four who each handle several roles (Andrea Bush, Kate McKenna, Anne Shoemaker, and Beverly Shannon) and Helenmary Ball, who mostly just channels Gingy, are fine, and occasionally even shine, in those too-rare moments when the material permits. Shannon did an attention-grabbing turn as a Chicano chica<\/em> in Chicago reminiscing about wearing a gang sweater and being blissfully groped by the gang leader. Shoemaker catches fire as a lesbian finding a tuxedo to wear to her wedding. Bush (a plus-size actress) showed something in a monologue about plus-size clothes. And I laughed at McKenna in a raunchy skit about a jailbird\u2019s wife wearing pants with a hole in the crotch so she could be pleasured while visiting him. Steve Goldklang seems to have directed them all well.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not them; it\u2019s the show. The Ephrons seem to have set out to make the point that on some profound level, women\u2019s clothes are themselves, and that women\u2019s very lives are bound up with their clothes and vice versa<\/em>. But the case is not well-documented. There are a couple of stabs at seriously supporting that argument. For instance there\u2019s a skit in which a woman mourns the misplacing of the perfect shirt, a loss that occurred at the same time as she was losing a boyfriend; well, neither loss caused the other. Partly because of that fact, the agonizing over the shirt sounds superficial and silly. There\u2019s another in which a woman stops wearing miniskirts after she\u2019s been raped; this is a more plausible case-in-point because obviously the injury to the woman\u2019s feelings about her own sexuality is being communicated through the language of clothes. But one would expect a greater change in the clothes to make the point. The lengthening of skirts is presented as a minor mid-course adjustment, since the main emphasis in the piece is on the thigh-high boots the woman wore both before and after the rape.<\/p>\n

While I wish it had been stronger, I\u2019d be loath to drive anyone away. In the end, it\u2019s a gentler show than I\u2019d have liked, but even at a somewhat dilute strength, it was quietly enjoyable. So go, but keep your expectations under control.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for photograph<\/p>\n

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The Ephrons seem to have set out to make the point that on some profound level, women\u2019s clothes are themselves, and that women\u2019s very lives are bound up with their clothes and vice versa. But the case is not well-documented. And little of it bears the stamp of the Ephron wit. But the performances are fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3098],"tags":[3987,3988,3985,3986,3989],"class_list":["post-3476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theater-reviews-and-commentary","tag-delia-ephron","tag-fells-point-corner-theatre","tag-love-loss-and-what-i-wore","tag-nora-ephron","tag-womens-clothes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3476"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3532,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476\/revisions\/3532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}