Hub show uses laughter to explore ‘Love & Loss’

By Rich Fahey

BOSTON – In the summer of 2013, a fledgling theater company engaged one of the leading lights in the Boston theater community to help get the company off the ground.

The Hub Theatre Company of Boston presented “Love, Loss & What I Wore,” directed by Paula Plum, as part of its first season.

A decade later, again under Plum’s direction, the play has made a most welcome return, this time to Club Café on Columbus Avenue in Boston through Aug. 5.  

The result is a production that is once again an engaging, touching, often poignant 90-minute look at the emotional connection between women and clothing, a connection that begins early in life and only seems to deepen and strengthen through the years.

Actually, the bond, we find out, is between women, their clothes, their shoes and other assorted accessories.

Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron wrote the piece, based on the book by Ilene Beckerman, and they assert that, when it comes to important events in their lives, women can recall not only the event, but what they were wearing at the time.

And while clothing is certainly at the heart of the piece – as set designer Justin Lahue’s huge neon clothes hangar in the center of the stage makes apparent – clothing is more of a  jumping-off spot to cover a vast variety of topics – some serious, some not so much – that confront women on a daily basis .

The company features three women  – June Kfoury, Lauren Elias, and Nettie Chickering – who were part of Hub’s powerhouse Norton Award-nominated production of  “Into the Breeches!” last season, while Kfoury and Elias were also part of that first production of “Love, Loss” a decade ago.

Barbara Douglass and Evelyn Holley are making their Hub debuts, and the five meld early on into a cohesive, dynamic unit.

Plum’s fingerprints are all over the piece in enhancing the ensemble’s sense of comic timing and setting a brisk pace that ensures that you’ll still be getting over one one-liner just before the next one hits.

As it was a decade ago, Kfoury’s character of Gingy is the emotional center of the piece. Gingy’s life story and sartorial choices will be chronicled along with her various affairs, marriages and divorces; she illustrates her choices with a series of sketches showing the various dresses of her life.

We will make the journey with her from childhood through good times and tumultuous times.

Each member of the ensemble will have a chance to be the center of attention, but there is great fun when they come together to deliver freestyle riffs on different topics. Take ‘bras,” with hilarious anecdotes including embarrassing moments involving training bras, or blow-up bras; wedding dresses; those ever-sexy boots; the cries of “I Have Nothing to Wear” or the pain and pleasure of high heels vs. the comfort of Birkenstocks.
The company will have you in tears when they describe outfits that made their mothers cringe.

Perhaps my favorite was an extended riff on handbags, including Elias’s story about the $5,600 Kelly bag and the time “I packed so much stuff in my Prada backpack I looked like a Sherpa.”
There’s also hilarious bits about the obsession with the color black, the pains and pleasures of botox, and even a very powerful — and funny — bit about a women who saw in a breast reconstruction after a mastectomy as a chance to “go Baywatch.”
In charting the upward rise of Hub in the past decade, one area in which the company has made huge strides is in production values. Kudos to all involved in that area of the show, with a special mention to Kat Lawrence’s costume design.  

The Hub remains Boston’s only theater company with a “pay what you can” ticket policy for all shows, but producer Elias noted that it costs the company about $1,000 to stage each performance.

In program notes Plum explained why it is important to re-stage this show now.  “Speaking of ‘Love & Loss,’ we as women have suffered a huge loss this year by virtue of an unjust ruling against female bodies.”

She said that rehearsals for the play became a cathartic experience for the actors, who shared their own stories of love and loss. “We have discovered how women support each other, celebrate their bodies, and find comfort, expression and identity through clothing and memory.”

And, along the way, generate cascades of laughter.

The Hub Theatre Company production of “Love, Loss & What I Wore,” by Nora and Delia Ephron based on the book by Ilene Beckerman. Directed by Paula Plum At Club Café, 209 Columbus Ave., Boston. Through Aug. 5. Hubtheatreboston.org. , 66 Marlborough St., Boston through Aug. 3. Hubtheatreboston.org.