The Rhetorical Review

Salt Lake City, UT — In Westminster University’s production of The Hatmaker’s Wife, director Kimberly M. Jew transforms Lauren Yee’s script into a meditation on memory, gender, and belonging. When a house begins to speak, memory becomes both burden and balm, revealing how love and displacement echo across generations. Through magical realism rooted in Jewish folklore, Yee examines what it means to inherit fractured histories—and how women, in particular, bear the weight of remembering what others choose to forget. Jew’s direction draws out these tensions with quiet precision, inviting reflection on the emotional labor embedded in care, marriage, and myth. What emerges is not just a story about memory, but a subtle critique of the gendered silences that sustain it.

A House That Remembers

When a young woman, simply called Voice, moves into a creaky old house with her boyfriend, she expects comfort and stability. Instead, the house begins to speak—literally. Its walls tell the story of a distracted hatmaker and his long-suffering wife, whose heartbreak lingers between plaster and time. What follows is a tender unraveling of memory, marriage, and the quiet ache of being misunderstood—an echo of the ways love both shelters and confines.

Jew’s production leans into the play’s magical realism with restraint. Light shifts become temporal portals; everyday objects pulse with longing. The talking wall—a highlight of stagecraft—embodies the play’s central metaphor: that homes, like people, hold stories they cannot forget. The result is theatre that shimmers not through spectacle, but through intimacy.

Magic, Memory, and Migration

Lauren Yee’s writing has always danced between humor and ache. In The Hatmaker’s Wife, fantasy becomes a language of survival—a way to name what has been lost to assimilation, displacement, and time. Beneath the whimsy, Yee asks: What does it mean to inherit love that is broken, or a language that has gone missing?

Jew’s direction lets the silences speak. The pacing trusts the audience’s imagination, allowing emotion to surface through gesture rather than exposition. When a golem lumbers across the stage clutching a bag of Cheetos or a light materializes on the wall, the absurd becomes sincere. The humor never cheapens the grief—it only frames it.

Magical Realism and Theatrical Lineage

My favorite aspect of The Hatmaker’s Wife is its magical realism—not as spectacle, but as a way of listening to the ordinary world. The talking wall, for instance, is at once comic and profound: a witness, a historian, a reluctant archivist of love and regret. Its self-conscious humor, speaking directly to both audience and characters, ironically reminded me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—specifically the “play within a play,” where Shakespeare’s mechanicals earnestly perform Pyramus and Thisbe before a bemused court. There, as in Yee’s work, the boundary between artifice and sincerity dissolves: laughter and heartbreak coexist, and the act of performance itself becomes a metaphor for human vulnerability.

Yee’s talking wall, like Shakespeare’s literal “Wall” in Dream, begins as a comic device but deepens into something more—the barrier that both divides and connects. In The Hatmaker’s Wife, that wall becomes an emotional archive, holding the echoes of a marriage and the unspoken words that outlast it. What begins as absurd gradually turns tender. Like Shakespeare’s enchanted forest, Yee’s house becomes a liminal space where objects speak and memory materializes, where love and loss mingle in the same breath. In both plays, the magic isn’t an escape from reality—it’s a way of feeling it more fully.

A Director of Listening

As both a theatre and ethnic studies scholar, Dr. Kimberly M. Jew—who holds a joint appointment at the University of Utah—brings deep interdisciplinary expertise to this production. A scholar of Asian American and Pacific Islander theatre, feminist performance, and postcolonial studies, Jew approaches direction as an act of cultural translation. Her staging of The Hatmaker’s Wife reflects that sensitivity: attentive to rhythm, silence, and the emotional labor of storytelling. Jew’s work often asks how performance can hold space for difference, and here she creates precisely that—a world where folklore and feeling coexist, and where the house itself becomes a metaphor for history’s lingering voices. The set, designed by Spencer Brown, is spare but full of possibility—a modest living room under warm lamplight, a window framing the faint suggestion of another world. It’s an ordinary space that feels ready to remember.

Still, The Hatmaker’s Wife occasionally startles with its gender politics. Commissioned in 2013, the play often reads as if it were written in the 1940s it evokes. Its men, eccentric and emotionally stunted, are given dimension but little empathy; its women—steady, capable, and self-sacrificing—too often serve as the scaffolding for someone else’s transformation. Even the narrative figure who guides us through the story doesn’t have a name—she is simply called “Voice.”

During the post-show talkback, Myranda Lloyd, a cast member reflected on that absence: “Many women lose their identity to the role they’re subjected to,” she said, noting that Voice embodies precisely that condition—a woman with agency but without identity. Lloyd paused, then added quietly, “I don’t have a name.” The play’s structure seems to ask women to define themselves through attachment—to men, to homes, to inherited silence.

Hetchman doesn’t even know his wife’s name. All she asks is for him to make her a hat—an act of love that should come easily to a hatmaker—and he refuses. When she asks for a child, he again says no. And that isn’t even the worst of it. Yet, after all this, she still stays. By the end, we’re meant to see her endless forgiveness and his eventual ability to learn her name as a success—but at what cost?

Cast Highlights

Myranda Lloyd’s Voice carries the story with a quiet ache—her uncertainty within the play’s magical surroundings unfolding into suspense. Her performance captures the thrill and unease of discovery, grounding the audience in empathy even as reality seems to slip.

Bella Willes, as Hetchman’s Wife, brings warmth and irony to her scenes, capturing the rhythms of domestic exhaustion without surrendering her wit—not an easy part to play when your husband can’t even remember your name.

Reagan Wolf Sieger’s Hetchman sustains an almost relentless absurd humor throughout the play—a remarkable feat for any actor, let alone a college student convincingly embodying an old man. Sieger’s timing and physicality make the role both funny and unexpectedly tender.

Noah Schiffman’s Meckel injects the production with a necessary dose of chaotic charm, his restlessness offsetting the play’s quieter moments.

Tu’imana Talanoa, as Gabe/Golem, imbues the role’s mythic absurdity with striking physical expressiveness and emotional depth, transforming what could be pure fantasy into something deeply human.

As Wall, Katherine Larson delivers one of the production’s most quietly affecting performances—a figure of both memory and witness, she grounds the play’s magical realism in an emotional realism that never wavers.

Together, the ensemble sustains the play’s delicate balance between whimsy and weight, laughter and loss—anchoring its surreal world in the simple, human desire to be remembered.

Production Crew Highlights

Behind the scenes, Westminster’s production team demonstrates the quiet precision that makes magical realism believable. Spencer Brown’s dual work in set and lighting design transforms minimalism into atmosphere—each subtle glow and shadow marking a shift between memory and myth. Andrea Davenport’s costumes bridge eras without fixing the story in any single time period, though the hats gesture toward the early to mid-1900s. Griffin Irish’s sound design weaves whimsy and melancholy together, layering faintly uncanny house sounds with evocative music. Zevyn Nutall’s props and Meghan Wall’s choreography lend texture and motion to a space always on the verge of transformation. Working in harmony with Stage Manager Charlotte Gordon and Assistant Stage Manager Gavin Versteeg, the crew sustains a delicate balance between precision and play. Their craftsmanship makes the production’s most intangible moments—the flicker of a wall’s voice, the pause before a memory returns—feel alive and deeply human.

The Talk Back

After the Saturday October 4, I stayed for the talkback, which quickly unfolded into an illuminating conversation. Students, parents, and faculty filled the small black box with questions that cut to the heart of the play’s contradictions. I asked about the play’s time period—why its treatment of women felt distinctly mid-century despite its contemporary commission. Jew acknowledged that the script “feels like the 1930s or 40s” but deliberately resists precision. That ambiguity, she suggested, is part of the play’s charm: a world untethered from time, where myth and memory intertwine. Still, in 2025, that timelessness reads differently. It reveals how nostalgia can soften the edges of patriarchy—how stories of love and loss sometimes preserve the very hierarchies they seem to transcend.

Varlo Davenport, the dramaturg and talkback leader, offered a line that lingered: “Characters can only hurt as badly as they can be happy.” It felt like an elegant key to both Yee’s writing and Jew’s direction.

Describing her role as the Wall, Katherine Larson added, “What I really wanted to achieve—my goal in the story—is to tell the story to Voice and to release the love that was never expressed by Hetchman.” Her words grounded the evening’s insights in something tender and human: that the play’s magic is not in its fantasy, but in its effort to make the unsaid finally heard.

Conclusion: Love in Translation

By the end, The Hatmaker’s Wife leaves its audience somewhere between laughter and reflection—a story where the ordinary world asks to be heard. Jew’s Westminster staging suggests that love, like memory, doesn’t vanish; it changes form. Through Yee’s language, the past lingers quietly in our present, shaping how we listen and how we remember. In The Hatmaker’s Wife, as in much of Yee’s work, the fantastical becomes a way to see truth more clearly—a reminder that the stories we tell about the past shape the ones we’re still trying to live.

Show Info

The Hatmaker’s Wife by Lauren Yee
Directed by: Kimberly Jew
Presented by: Westminster University Performing Arts
Dumke Student Theater, Emma Eccles Jones Conservatory
October 4–11, 2025

Show Info: The Hatmaker’s Wife

By Lauren Yee | Directed by Kimberly M. Jew
Presented by Westminster University Theatre Department

📍 Dumke Student Theatre, Emma Eccles Jones Conservatory
🗓️ October 9–11, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. (Thursday—Saturday)

• General Admission — $15 ($16.65 w/ fees)
• Westminster Alumni — $5
• Other University Students — Free
• K–12 Students & Chaperones — Free
• Westminster Community Members — Free

🎫 Purchase Tickets | 📞 Box Office: (801) 832-2457
📍 Westminster University, 1840 S 1300 E, Salt Lake City, UT 84105 

Cast

Hetchman – Reagan Wolf Sieger
Hetchman’s Wife – Bella Willes
Meckel – Noah Schiffman
Voice – Myranda Lloyd
Gabe/Golem – Tu’imana Talanoa
Wall – Katherine Larson

Production Team

Director – Kimberly Jew
Stage Manager – Charlotte Gordon
Assistant Stage Manager – Gavin Versteeg
Dialect Coach – Stacey Jenson
Set & Lighting Design – Spencer Brown
Costume Design – Andrea Davenport
Sound Design – Griffin Irish
Properties Design – Zevyn Nutall
Choreography – Meghan Wall
Dramaturg – Varlo Davenport
Auxiliary Coach – Stephanie Stroud

Additional Production Staff

Theatre Program Co-Chairs: Spencer Potter & Stephanie Stroud
Technical Director: Spencer Brown
Assistant Technical Directors: Syd Shoell & Maddie Hill
Costume Shop Manager: Andrea Davenport
Graphic Design: Michael Yount
Performing Arts Office Manager: Summer Spence
Patron Services & Outreach Manager: Madison Archibald
Marketing Assistant: Chloe Mizantzidi
Build Crew: Madison Hill, Gavin Versteeg, Natalie Crofts, Austin Ray, Ace Johansen
Costume Shop Technicians: Katherine Larson, El Patterson, Trinity Medina, Olivia-Vaimoana Solomone-Hala’eua, Sofia Nyquist, Ethan Montano, Arielle Del Valle
Scene Shop Technicians: Madison Hill, Gavin Versteeg, Natalie Crofts, Ace Johansen, Marissa Carson, Charlotte Gordon, Heide Andre
Board Operations: Heidi Andre, Ace Johansen, Marissa Carson
Dressers: Arielle Del Valle, Maddie Hill
Running Crew: Natalie Crofts
Special Thanks: Performance Audio and Marina Gomberg

About the Play and Playwright

Lauren Yee is one of the most celebrated voices in contemporary American theatre, known for her sharp humor, cross-cultural storytelling, and inventive use of magical realism. Born and raised in San Francisco, Yee earned her BA in English and Theatre Arts from Yale University and her MFA in Playwriting from UC San Diego, where she trained under some of the most experimental voices in the field. Her work often explores the tensions between heritage and modernity, memory and translation, and how diasporic families make sense of loss through story.

Yee’s plays—including Cambodian Rock Band, The Great Leap, King of the Yees, and in a word—have been produced on major stages across the U.S., from the Goodman Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre to Signature Theatre Company in New York. She’s received top national honors: the Whiting Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, Horton Foote Prize, and Doris Duke Artist Award. By 2019, she had earned more than $400,000 in playwriting prizes—an extraordinary feat for a dramatist under forty—and was named one of the most-produced living playwrights in America by American Theatre magazine.

Her 2018 breakout, Cambodian Rock Band, solidified her reputation. That play—part rock concert, part historical reckoning—traveled nationally and cemented her as a writer unafraid to blend pop culture, political trauma, and mythic form. Critics have described her signature as “genre-bending storytelling rooted in memory and music,” and her work often centers on questions of who gets to inherit history—and how we perform it.

Before those larger hits, The Hatmaker’s Wife marked an early milestone in Yee’s career. Developed at the PlayPenn New Play Conference in 2011 and premiering Off-Broadway with The Playwrights Realm in 2013, the play announced her distinctive voice: whimsical yet melancholy, full of emotional intelligence and surreal humor.

While The Hatmaker’s Wife never reached the mainstream popularity of Cambodian Rock Band or The Great Leap, it remains a favorite in university and regional theatre circuits because of its emotional accessibility and ensemble-driven storytelling. Critics have praised its imagination—Ben Brantley of The New York Times called it “a cabinet of curiosities”—but some have also noted its uneven pacing, tonal leaps, and “loose plotting” compared to Yee’s later, more structurally assured works..