There's a new sort of play showing up on stages around the country: Let's call it Support Group Theatricals (SGT). The premise of SGT is that if you're experiencing one of life's difficult passages, you can probably be enticed to go to a show that's all about your struggles.
For reasons which I don't understand, SGT is especially for women: Thus we had The Vagina Monologues, about coming to terms with your genitalia; Menopause: The Musical, about welcoming the change of life; and now Hats: The Musical, about turning 50 and learning to love it. SGT works this way: You watch people like yourself speak and sing about troubles that you know all too well and then you walk out of the theater feeling validated and personally strengthened. You're not alone after all — others feel just like you do. You've found solidarity in a theater.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that SGT isn't to be taken seriously: Vagina Monologues in particular was capable of reaching people deeply (not least because of its investigation of sexual violence), and on the evening I saw Menopause, the audience (99 percent women) roared its approval.
But watching Hats the other night, I had the feeling that maybe there was more than a hint of exploitation here, that these tales about females dealing with loneliness, horniness and wrinkles "on all four cheeks" were put together by clever marketers who knew their demographics to the last decimal point. Yes, the show is entertaining, the singers are talented, some of the melodies are memorable. But at the heart of all this human feeling is something cynical: an advertiser's strategy. I'm not encouraged to find the legitimate theater being used so shrewdly.
Well, enough complaining. If you're a woman and you're feeling blue about turning 50, Hats: The Musical is just the therapy you need. It features seven skillful actor/singers, 12 songs by such luminaries as Melissa Manchester and Pam Tillis, and some mildly amusing dialogue by Marcia Milgrom Dodge and Anthony Dodge.
The play starts with a woman named Mary Anne (Marguerite Bennett), who's just minutes away from 50 and to whom fairy godmother Ruby Red Hat (Wendy Starkand) appears. Mary Anne has been complaining, "I don't want to see my mother when I see my own face," and "I need a hump that doesn't come from osteoporosis."
Ruby Red Hat has arrived to turn that negativity into joy: By the time she's through, Mary Anne will (supposedly) embrace 50 and beyond. It's all bolstered by Red Hat's wit: "If you get nervous," she tells Mary Anne, "think of the audience in stirrups at the gynecologist."
Other women appear, all with problems like Mary Anne's (let the support group begin!). There's the Duchess (Nadeen Holloway), who found her husband glancing longingly at other women, and the multiple-divorced Contessa (Starkand again) who remembers how she gave up money, sex and sleep looking after her kids. There's the Baroness (Carrie SaLoutos) who became a workaholic after her divorce, and there's Lady (Jean Vanier), a widow, Mary Anne's mother, who sadly recalls how her husband passed away when she was making his tea.
There's the vivacious Dame (Eileen Koteles), a happy wife and mother who can't get over her new life in an empty nest (the children have skedaddled, and her obstetrician husband is always on call.) And finally there's Princess (Lynne Locher), whose husband left her for a 35-year-old woman, and who marvels that her rival is "just like me."
What these seven women represent, of course, is the whole spectrum of middle-age (and middle-class) women in a funk and all the problems that a similar woman in the audience might recognize, from obesity to unslaked sexual hunger to being single (and learning to date again) to feeling invisible in public.
There are a few genuine high points: when the randy Duchess sings that "My oven's still hot," and tells her man that "I guarantee you won't need that little blue pill." Or when several of the women sing "Invisible" (by Melissa Manchester and Sharon Vaughn), about the disregard our society has for women no longer young.
The only character that we come to know in any depth, though, is Mary Anne, and the others matter more as symbols of discontent. But that's a gambit of SGT: Recognize the role, and the entirety will hurry to mind. This song is for you, and you know who you are.
The production is attractive. Director Rick Criswell has also designed the multitude of costumes, and Scott Cooper's set could easily be the interior of an upscale department store (women's department). But that Saks Fifth Avenue vision is also the weakness of the show: What about working-class women; don't they also matter at middle age? And why does no one mention the fact that women no longer tied down by domestic demands might find the time right for social activism or politics? In the age of Nancy Pelosi (not to mention Hillary Rodham Clinton), these omissions aren't minor.
But Hats: The Musical knows its demographic and won't be diverted. If you're middle class or upper-middle, and dismayed at middle age, this ticket has your name on it. And this footnote: Baby Boomer. Disposable Income. Time on her hands. Seeking meaning.
Or, as one of the first songs has it: "We're 50 … let the good times begin."
This article appears in Feb 13-19, 2008.