STAGE REVIEW: LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE

Nancy Dussault in Love, Loss, and What I Wore.

Barely presentable

By Ed Rampell

The conceit of Deli and Nora Ephron’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore is that the personal lives of five women is told via the vehicle of their apparel, fashion accessories, footwear, etc., a device that pours old wine into new bottles with designer labels.

More of a staged reading than an actual play, for 90 minutes sans intermission the quintet of actresses remain in their seats, reading from their scripts, relating how this dress or that handbag, etc., conjures up memories of family life, romances, marriages and so on.

The premiere was reasonably well-acted and included stage/TV/cabaret performer Nancy Dussault. But the sparse set design, props plus lack of live music makes the show pretty one dimensional. The nearly complete absence of action and sole reliance on monologues violates stagecraft’s cardinal rule: Don’t tell me, show me! There’s a reason why it’s called show business and not blab biz. If I want a blah-blah-blah-a-thon I’ll tune in to talk radio. It’s called mise-en-scène- look it up.

Onstage a sixth, younger female periodically flips through large cardboard images of attire hanging on a rack to illustrate the item of clothing the thesps are, in character (often as nice New York Jewish girls), describing, using the vestments as springboards to private life recollections. Another rack full of garments is stage left, but these actual clothes are never incorporated into the vignettes by the actresses, who almost entirely sit while each read mostly separate stories from their scripts.

To be fair, some will find this theatrical version of a “chick flick” or “chick lit” to be witty, engaging and revelatory of the female self. At the end of the opening night show some audience members gave it a standing ovation.

But this verbose confessional isn’t everybody’s cup of stage tea. Other theatergoers may find it tedious, coming to dread “anything but the rack!” Those who couldn’t care less about fashions and whether one is wearing, say, high heels, flats or Birkenstocks are likely to find that sitting through this gabfest minus staging, blocking, etc., wears thin and is tiresome. Those expecting live stage dramas and comedies (Love, Loss, and What I Wore attempts to blend both) to be, you know, dramatized, may find the play to wear on them and be nerve racking.

It’s not that the female point of view is inherently uninteresting -- quite the contrary. As Freud asked, “what do women want?” and heterosexual males are generally interested in finding out. But the fact that this show is not really a dramatization but, as said, closer to being a staged reading (and doesn’t really seem as if it’s being forthrightly ballyhooed as such), may disappoint auds, despite their gender. It’s not a question of sexual and gender preference but of stage style preference.

This uninspiring, flat production is directed by Jenny Sullivan, with the Ephron sisters adapting Irene Beckerman’s book. But this is no You’ve Got Mail or Sleepless in Seattle and it may leave bored viewers muttering under their breath: “No wonder Carl Bernstein left Nora… Good thing he didn’t reveal who Deep Throat was to her!”


Love, Loss, and What I Wore runs through June 7 at the Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach, CA 92651. For more info: 949-497-2787; www.LagunaPlayhouse.com.