Theater Review: “Love, Loss, and What I Wore”
By Claire Hellar
May 20, 2010 9:00 p.m.
Smiles abound as theatergoers leave the Saturday showing of “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” playing at the Geffen Playhouse through July 4.
Nora and Delia Ephron, known for films such as “When Harry Met Sally” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” respectively, adapted the play from Ilene Beckerman’s best-selling novel of the same name while adding some of their own stories along the way.
With a cast of five top-notch actresses, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” is a witty and largely light-hearted series of vignettes about what it means to be a woman.
The staging is simple ““ five chairs and five music stands lined up in a row. The performers, dressed in simple black, reference scripts as necessary throughout the play. The only real prop is a clothes rack of large sketches of various outfits. The minimalistic approach is at first jarring ““ the play is so much about telling rather than showing, narration rather than action, that at first it feels more like a reading than a performance.
More active elements emerge, however, as the actresses embark with rapid-fire precision on a series of monologues that include everything from a girl and her mother quarrelling over fashion to a Berkeley undergraduate who stops wearing miniskirts after a rape. With titles such as “Black,” “The Prom Dress” and “The Bra,” the character-based segments intermingle with vignettes that use clothes as vehicles for emotional life experiences. Carol Kane, famous for her roles in “Annie Hall” and “Taxi,” plays narrator Gingy, and relates Beckerman’s original story with puckish charm.
The script is consistently and even uproariously funny, tracking women through the inevitable experiences of marriage, dressing rooms, sales assistants and buying that first bra (“Come over here to the training section,” one girl’s mother trumpets to her within hearing range of her crush).
In an all-star cast, Tracee Ellis Ross (“Girlfriends”) and Rita Wilson (“Sleepless in Seattle”) particularly shine, owning the stage with their charisma and pitch-perfect dramatic and comic timing.
The monologues are mostly upbeat, but cancer, death and heartbreak do thread in and out of this world and some deeper emotional resonances are occasionally reached for.
“Love, Loss” does display a slight bipolarity in the writing. A subtle but distinct divide develops between Beckerman’s slower-paced writing style focused on Gingy and the Ephrons’ snappier, wittier writing style which ranges across many characters and situations. The clothing sketches on the rack, which Gingy relies on for her stories, add to this dichotomy.
This inclusion of childlike, cutesy visuals in a production that is mostly made up of sophisticated, even daring monologues strikes a slightly off-key note.
“Love, Loss, and What I Wore” is a charming effort that is ultimately not about fashion at all. Clothing does provide a kind of overarching cohesiveness, but “Love, Loss” is at heart a warm and funny homage to real women.
In a society in which the female identity has been altered by the feminist revolution, the play reveals universal experiences of womanhood.
There is something infinitely reassuring, and a little cathartic, about “Love, Loss, and What I Wore.”
E-mail Hellar at [email protected].
