New York City – Present Day

Leigh Majors has her own life and career just the way she wants it after many years of living in the shadow of her mother, a fading Hollywood actress named Bridie Hart. Leigh works off-Broadway, directing critically acclaimed plays that don’t involve her mother, at the avant-garde Wonderland Theater. Her marriage to a “civilian,” Michael Payne, provides a quiet, orderly life, unlike her experience growing up in Bridie’s house. As satisfying as it is to cut Bridie out of her life, Leigh doesn’t have everything she could ever want; she isn’t being challenged to produce her best work, she doesn’t have children. On her birthday, Michael throws a surprise party for Leigh and it’s wonderful, except for the fact that Bridie is a guest. As his gift, Michael has written a play that he wants Leigh to direct called “Women in Hats.” Actually a rather well written, old-fashioned, commercially viable work, it becomes Michael’s baby, and he invests everything they have to produce this play. This is the challenge Leigh needs, except for one tiny problem; the producer insists on Leigh’s egomaniacal mother as the play’s lead actor. As they head towards casting, then rehearsals, Leigh turns her life upside down and inside out -- it will never be the same again.

WOMEN IN HATS has a dark, bittersweet, humorous voice. A life spent with a heavy drinking, hard partying mother made Leigh’s childhood miserable. Though she doesn’t realize it, she has spent most of her adult life hiding from her mother, not living. This play is a chance to come into her own as a director, as a woman, but she is going to have to fight Bridie for the right to do her job. If she doesn’t control things, her mother will do what comes naturally and take over, with disastrous results. Leigh must become the adult and the director she was meant to be.

Judy Sheehan has written about what she knows; she is a playwright herself. She created a detailed character in Leigh, with many threads to her story, insecurity, infertility, and a marriage that is just not working anymore. Ms. Sheehan rounds out the cast with some well-drawn secondary characters as well, who add a comic touch. Most importantly, WOMEN IN HATS is well written, logical, and yet not predictable at all. I recommend it to fiction lovers everywhere.

Lisa Baca