The baffling title is the beginning of the end for this good
idea gone wrong. Why D’Ya
Make Me Wear This, Joe? depicts a
lesbian relationship during W.W.II between two women as their fiancés are off
to war. There will always be interest in stories of the past for the gay
audience, for those stories have been so hidden from us over the decades. Yet Joe, with its rambling series of events,
dolloped historical tidbits and sluggish direction by
Melissa Attebery makes for a tedious bore.
Joe feels long and
many pointless aspects might have been cut to give the production a better pace.
Foremost, there is the extraneous character of The Old Woman (Eileen Lacy), who we quickly realize is
Charlie (Cheryl Leibert)
in her younger years. The concept of the play is that Older Charlie is moving
out of some home that happens to have dozens of articles reminding her of her
war time relationship with Aubra (Amanda Weeden).
The memories come to life and play out the real story of the play. Older
Charlie never fit into the play well and she ended up being a glorified set and
props mover. She couldn’t do the technical chores alone, however, and was
joined by a literal mover (Same Cates),
who, outside of playing a father character at one point, simply moves boxes out
of the way. Simply dropping the Old Woman character would have tightened up the
play considerably, for by the end, her presence never amounts to anything and
she is forced to interact with the young characters as a kind of a ghost. This
is backwards, for it was established in the beginning that the Old Woman was
conjuring up the ghosts. Or, is she manipulating history as a fantasy? Her attempts to do so never work, for history
cannot be changed, but the audience was supposed to be working with her
imagination and all she can do is imagine one last
dance with her former lover.
Odd jokes are dropped in that seem ridiculous in light of
the sincere thrust of the play. In a desperate plea to convince Aubra to move in and start a life together, Charlie says,
“I hear there are people like us in
There is another plot and character point that Aubra has
polio, secluding her in her house. Although this point does much to embitter
the character and Charlie’s entrance into her life might have turned this sour
attitude of life into joy, this is never really explored. The polio doesn’t
affect Aubra’s ability to find satisfaction with women a hindrance in the least.
In fact she states that she has had many women, as her husband travels a lot. And
so the very good idea of the entire enterprise has been dropped. It is not
about a crippled lesbian who has her faith restored when another woman enters
her life, but an obvious tale about how impossible it was for gay relationships
to succeed in the world before Stonewall. That was general knowledge going in.
The technical aspects were all handled well under limited
festival conditions, though they were necessarily basic. Wigs might have been
given more attention as well as fastened securely upon the actors’ heads. The
cast gave overall sincere and credible performances with Cheryl Leibert standing out as particularly winning and Wayne Asbury quite honest as Philip. If
the playwright is willing to go back to work, a judicial editing job and an eye
toward revealing history with more than the obvious details might transform the
play into something the genre of gay and lesbian theatre really needs.
Writing: 1
Directing: 0
Acting: 2
Set: 1
Costumes: 1
Lighting/Sound: 2
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Copyright 2006 Michael D. Jackson