Raven Adams and Rachel Isahz confer about Love, Loss and What I Wore for the Pompano Players’ first production // Photos by Amy Pasquantonio
By Jan Sjostrom
It’s a rare woman who doesn’t have a love-hate relationship with clothes. That’s what makes Love, Loss, and What I Wore so relatable to a big chunk of the audience the newly minted Pompano Players hopes to attract.
The Pompano Beach Cultural Center’s resident company is making its debut with the show, which links women’s ambivalent feelings about clothes with the memories they evoke.
Nora Ephron, best known for the screenplays of films such as Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally… and You’ve Got Mail, and her sometime writing partner and sister Delia Ephron collaborated on the show, which builds on a memoir written by Ilene Beckerman.
Love, Loss, and What I Wore relies heavily on humor, with scenes featuring youthful conflicts between mothers and daughters, the frustrations of the dressing room and serial marriages. But it also touches on topics such as surviving rape and battling breast cancer.
The production is not the best introduction to a brand-new company.
The piece is structured as a series of monologues and a few larger scenes performed by five actresses.
The script is problematic. Its only through line is the character Gingy, who’s a stand-in for Beckerman. Gingy’s scenes, which like other scenes begin with projected titles, march along in time, but have little connection to the rest of the show. Unless audience members arrive knowing that the show metamorphosed out of Beckerman’s memoir they won’t understand why Gingy gets such special treatment. At about two hours performed without intermission, the show is also over-long.
But the production’s greatest flaw is that the performers read most of their lines from scripts propped on music stands.
This hamstrings them from fully engaging with the audience or fleshing out their characterizations with unhampered body language, facial expressions, eye contact and other tools of the acting trade. Performers spend far too much time eyeing their scripts while planted on the couch and chairs of the all-white set. Punchlines get flattened, timing falls by the wayside and stories lose their zest.
Apparently, Love, Loss, and What I Wore traditionally is performed as a variety of staged reading. That might be convenient for theater companies, and certainly worked when it was performed by rotating casts, as was true in several past productions. But it serves no apparent dramatic purpose.
Director Jeremy Quinn and the cast get the most out of what the script has to offer when it ceases to be the center of attention.
Christine Chavers
That’s when actresses Christine Chavers as Gingy, along with Francine Birns, Raven Adams, Rachel Ihasz and Sarah Romeo as the other characters, prove they are capable of more than this production usually allows.
Birns brings searing pathos to a story about a childhood memory of a blue bathrobe worn by a mother whose name was never mentioned after she died.
Romeo, in a rare moment off script and standing, hilariously wiggles and writhes as her character submits to a saleswoman maneuvering her client’s breasts to fit perfectly into a bra.
Ihasz manages to make nearly all her characters come alive. In her best scene her character confides her feelings about high heels, which pinch her feet so much she can hardly think, but make her legs look gorgeous. “I had a choice: heels or think,” she says with a sly smile and perfect timing. “I chose heels.”
Scenes in which the performers get up and rifle through the clothes racks that flank the set are like a breath of fresh air. In one, the women bemoan the paucity of their over-stuffed closets. In another, set in a dressing room, the characters air their body image anxieties.
Regrettably, the clothes the show revolves around aren’t featured, except in sketches Gingy uses to illustrate her story. A garment, shoe or purse here and there would have relieved the weight of words.
Fortunately, Pompano Players has five more shows to go in its season, which emphasizes comedies and musicals. There’s still time to make a better impression.
Pompano Players performs Love, Loss, and What I Wore through Oct. 20 at the Pompano Beach Cultural Center, 50 W. Atlantic Blvd., Pompano Beach. Performances are held at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The show runs two hours without intermission. Tickets cost $45, $55 and $65. Season subscriptions are also on sale. For tickets, visit pompanobeachculturalcenter.com or call (954) 501-1910.
