“Love, Loss, and What I Wore” explores the relationship between clothes and seminal events in women’s lives, specifically how certain items of clothing define particular events in their memories. The quasi stage reading—a cast of five rotating actors hold scripts throughout, sitting in a line and rarely moving—is a series of unrelated monologues with such vague titles as “The Bathrobe,” “Boots,” and most memorably, “I Hate My Purse.” Each story develops the play’s ongoing thesis of the unknowable importance of clothing in a woman’s life. This thesis is fully fleshed out in the only through-line of the play, an ongoing tale titled “Gingy’s Story.” In it, a woman named Gingy recounts her entire life in an almost memoir-esque fashion simply by describing the clothes she was wearing at different stages in her life and what these clothes represented to her at each time. Through such a simple theatrical device, a women’s closet is transformed from a dump of wasted money (in most husbands’ opinions) to a visual history of a woman’s past loves, losses, and everything in between.
Such a reversal of a commonly held male idea—that a woman’s closet is an unused wasteland—is hidden under layers of what some may describe as a chick-script, just as Ephron’s spin on the old adage “men and women can’t just be friends” was hidden under the romantic comedy façade of “When Harry Met Sally.” Yet, both materials’ lasting power hinges on this deeper exploration, which is why the play’s superficial flaws—its repetitiveness, uneven pace, and sometimes forgettable stories—can be forgiven in light of its answer to that age-old male question: “Why do women need all these shoes?!”
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