Drama Dock Theatre Company will continue its 48th season with Lauren Yee’s award-winning play, “The Hatmaker’s Wife,” playing September 26–29 at Vashon Island High School Theater.
At the helm is local theater artist Samantha Sherman, who said she was thrilled to be directing her first fully produced show since 1991.
“This is one of the most dynamic plays I have had the pleasure to work on,” said Sherman. “There’s just so much happening in this script: floating babies, a mythical creature whose presence isn’t what it seems, lots of belly laughs, and moments so touching that I am transported.”
Sherman called the show’s cast and production team a director’s dream.
The cast includes local actors Steven Sterne, Maria Glanz (last seen in this season’s musical “As You Like It”), Harris Levinson, Alyssa Norling (who has recently appeared in Drama Dock’s “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney” and “See How They Run”), Philip Gorbachov, Mik Kuhlman, Desiree Workun Mcintyre, and Sierra Tinhof (also in “As You Like It”).
The company also includes local artist Danny Powers, who is doing double duty — not only serving as scenic designer but also composing original music for the show.
His score, said Sherman, brings a depth to the show that is both joyful and haunting.
”Having never worked with a composer, at first I couldn’t imagine how the score would work with the scenes,” she said. “Now I can’t imagine this show without it.”
Other behind-the-scenes contributors include Adam Ende (puppet design and construction), Jacob Viramontes (lighting design), Stephanie Blower (costume design), Jill Bulow (properties design), Ellie Hughes (intimacy direction) and Kate Myre (dialect coach). Elise Ericksen is the show’s stage manager.
“The Hatmaker’s Wife” tells two stories in parallel: that of a young couple with relationship problems moving into their first home together, and a misanthropic retired hatmaker and his adventurous, headstrong wife. Connecting these two plots is the house itself, whose walls come to life and share the saga of the previous occupants with the young woman, in the hope of saving her relationship. By the play’s end, the house reveals a deeper connection between the two stories, using magical realism and Yiddish folklore to show the generational consequences of neglect and taking one another for granted.
Playwright Lauren Yee developed the play at PlayPenn New Play Conference, in 2011, and at The Playwrights Realm, in 2013. “The Hatmaker’s Wife” won Kitchen Dog Theatre’s 2012 New Works Festival and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award for Drama. The New York Times hailed the play as “courageous [and] childlike,” calling the script’s landscape a “parallel universe of folklore, where people are not lifelike, but bigger, stranger and more real than life.”
The Washington Post lauded the play’s magical realism as “the lens through which [the play] explores the story’s more serious themes of depression, obsession and the myriad ways we love.”
Performance dates for “The Hatmaker’s Wife” are at 7 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Sept. 26-28, and 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28, at Vashon High School. Find out more and get tickets at dramadock.org.
(Left to right) Vashon theater-makers Samantha Sherman and Danny Powers, seen here in January during the 14/48 Vashon Project, are now part of the creative team on “The Hatmaker’s Wife.” (Michelle Bates photo)
