I generally have two rules when I write a post for this blog. I don’t say anything about anyone that could be traced to that person. I will refer to “a friend”, but not to the friend by name. Secondly, I try not to criticize for the purpose of criticizing – what’s the point? If I can change the world with my criticism (i.e., if I can convince someone to vote against Donald Trump and for someone who can defeat him), I will do it. But if I don’t like a play, why should I bother to criticize it? Especially if it is at the end of a run, and no one who reads this blog will likely ever see it?

But there are exceptions to everything and last night I wrote a very critical post (sitting in “drafts”) about the production of Lauren Yee’s The Hatmaker’s Wife that is ending its run at Theater J. And just because I did not find it a good play, and thought it even a worse production, who cares? Particularly since others must have liked it, and the actors got a 50%+ standing ovation at the end of the show.

My memory often fails me when thinking of things I have seen in the past (often I don’t remember seeing them at all), but my memory of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play Arcadia involved a house where the current residents and prior residents interacted in mystical ways that looked real, but maybe weren’t. Maybe we were in a realm of dreams or mysticism. I don’t remember details, but I remember being overwhelmed by the play, which I think I saw at the Folger Theatre. Maybe 20 years ago.

Perhaps Arcadia was an inspiration for Yee, who has a young unmarried couple move into a house where the walls not only have ears but talk and write, and throw individual sheets of paper over themselves, so that the young woman can read the story of the prior residents of the house, and find herself enmeshed in it in a very personal way. And while the wall is writing this story and the young woman (not named in the play, and cited only as “Voice”) is reading aloud what is on the papers, the prior residents are also in the house, acting out what the Wall is telling the Voice about the past.

The young woman is, in the Theater J casting, an Asian-American (more American than Asian) , as is the eponymous [second day in a row using that word] “hatmaker’s wife” (who is more Asian than American), who lives with her husband, who is not Asian-American at all, but looks and talks like he just came out of a shtetl in deepest Romania, as does his neighbor and friend who plays a major role in the play. An unlikely duo for older people now dead – how many European born, ethnically identifiable, Jewish hat makers back in the day married Chinese Americans who looked like they just arrived in the country.

And then it turns out that this very Americanized young woman (probably in her 20s) is the daughter of this mixed couple (she resembles her mother only) who look like, if they were still alive today, would be in the 90s or so. And, as you watched the story, it looked like her father didn’t want a baby and simply lost her at home one day, when her mother went to the bathroom or something. How did he lose her? He didn’t love her enough, so she disappeared up into the sky (the ceiling of the room did not seem to stop her) and was never found again. Except she obviously landed somewhere, grew up not knowing about her parentage at all, and by chance moved into her parents’ house where the Wall could talk to her and write down this story to her, with pages magically flying to her over the wall, while we – the lucky audience – get to watch her parents story play out in real time?

Oh, and did I tell you about the golem? The monster who appears in the house and is at first scary, but then becomes the hat maker’s best friend (along with his neighbor to be sure) until the hat maker’s wife (who has left the hat maker and stolen his favorite hat to find another hat maker to make a replica of the hat but one that she could wear since her shtetl born husband refuses to make hats for women, who should never been seen in a hat). It turns out that the golem is not a friendly guy after all, because he has come as the harbinger of death for the hat maker’s wife, just hanging around until she returns. Who knew?

Have a told you enough? Let me end with this: there seemed to be no reason in the script for the hat maker to be European born Jewish, nor for his wife and Voice to be Asian or Asian-American. So what was Theater J trying to say? Damned if I know.

Okay, so this post is the exception to the rules which I outlined at the start. Some things just call out to be exceptions. And to my friend who doesn’t think I should detail plots of books, movies or plays……for you, too, this is an exception.

But, more broadly speaking, why do I tell you any of this? Because maybe I missed something? Maybe it’s obvious? Maybe this play will be a classic and the Theater J production will spoken of over the coming millennia? Only time (and the walls) will tell.