Ten Thousand Things delivers an emotional story while keeping the comedic virtuosity | By Anne Holzman (Winter 2024)
The Hatmaker’s Wife by Lauren Yee
(Directed by Joel Sass, Ten Thousand Things Theater, various locations through March 17, 2024)
A wall that can talk and a writer’s imagination connect two generations of apartment dwellers in surprising ways in The Hatmaker’s Wife, brought to life with the usual panache of Ten Thousand Things Theater (TTT) at various Twin Cities locations through March 17.
The script by Lauren Yee is a strange, abstract read, but TTT roots it in dusty, sweaty realism as a young couple moves into an apartment and embarks on a shared life. It soon becomes apparent that the character scripted as Voice, played by Michelle de Joya, has access to a world that her partner Gabe, played by Clay Man Soo, cannot hear or see. This world will drive them apart, even as an older love story breaks through and resolves itself in newfound passion.
Yee’s wall is a character called Wall, played at TTT by the very tall and craggy Tyson Forbes draped in beautiful plaster-toned patchwork by costume designer Sonya Berlovitz. Wall drops pages of the older story into Voice’s hands, driving each new scene. As she watches each scene play out, perhaps in her imagination, Voice drifts farther from Gabe’s quotidian existence. Yee seems to ask, “how far apart can a couple drift before the relationship is truly over? Can we ever really know the person we call our life partner?”
The older couple who inhabited the apartment years before are the hatmaker named Hetchman, played by Jim Lichtscheidl, and Hetchman’s wife, played by Kimberly Richardson. A central issue of the play, and a sly critique of marriage in the Western tradition, is that no one can recall the wife’s name; she is known only by her relationship to Hetchman. As we can see by the parallel unnamed Voice, not much has changed between generations.
Wall, Hetchman, and Wife all speak in thick Yiddish accents, as does Meckel, an old friend of the couple, played by Pedro Bayon. Hetchman seems to have no emotional interest in his wife but is weirdly attached to his hat, which issues happy hat music that makes him shiver with pleasure. Wife resents this and takes the hat to have a copy made for herself by the second, third, or fourth best hat maker in town since her own husband, the best, refuses to make one for her. A Golem shows up, another reference to Yiddish storytelling. The Golem reveals secrets as the Wall keeps dropping pages to launch new scenes, until a connection is revealed between the couples that is more than just living under the same roof.
In a weekday afternoon performance at Avalon School in St. Paul, appreciative laughs met Hetchman’s crassly humorous opening scene, in which he used a claw tool meant for reaching objects on high shelves to scratch himself and retrieve snacks from the TV stand. He remains firmly rooted in his chair as Wife passes back and forth with various housecleaning tools, berating him for his laziness. Richardson’s voice as the Wife, ranging from squeals to growls, made her character especially poignant.
There was only one brief bit of audience interaction, unusual for TTT, which typically engages its audience throughout a performance. Nevertheless, the intense sadness and loss in The Hatmaker’s Wife was balanced by the company’s comedic virtuosity. Directed by Joel Sass, with music director Katherine Fried, this production brims with music and noise that fill the spaces of the spare script and lend it an air of magic.
Like all TTT performances, this one is done in the round, so that the viewer sees the action against the backdrop of an audience reacting across the circle. It is as if a story told around a fire had come to energetic life. When a character says, “love keeps you grounded,” and then a baby flies away, it is at once both heartbreaking and funny.
At the heart of the story is the loss or abandonment (depending how one looks at it) of a child. A baby left unattended is spirited away while a parent turns to attend to work. It is a message that is particularly meaningful for parents. It landed heavily for me, both as an adoptive mother and as a mother remembering a time when I had a colicky infant, who for months gave me little rest.
The story, although delivered with enough lightness and comedic balance, reminds us that children leave, families fall apart, and our best is often not good enough. We blame ourselves, we blame each other, and we keep our hat music trapped in our heads. We live with our choices and our failures, and if our walls could talk, we would probably hear more questions than answers.
