Love, Loss, and What I Wore

Love, Loss, and What I Wore puts love and loss at center stage. The show features four women who go through multiple marriages, come out, lose their mothers at young ages, get raped, and more: all of life's worst bestowed on this small sample population. Veanne Cox and Lillias White deliver convincing performance, but the show's handicap is in the script, not the acting. While the actresses harp on their crises, the audience craves meaning in stability.

Perhaps the "what I wore" aspect of the show is meant to deliver the consistency so lacking in the leads' lives. However, the joyful, creative element of style is reduced to superficiality as the women put so much emphasis on that wrap dress or those suede boots. After sitting through one too many monologues about a purse, it behooves the audience to ask why the people in their lives then aren't given as much value as the material things these women adore. We yearn to see their fashion-centered romance and devotion play out in their human relationships, we hope that the play will conclude on this happy high, but such affection never leaves Filene's Basement.

Surely, the goal of Love, Loss, and What I Wore is not to expose a bunch of superficial ladies who have their priorities screwed up. It probably hopes to empower women. However, LLWW forgets that empowerment is a human phenomenon, one that requires a lot more than the occasional mention of fashion.