The playwright Nick Jones is a genius conceptualist with wobbly completion. In Important Hats of the Twentieth Century, he imagines rival fashion designers in 1937 New York, one of whom snags a time travel device and journeys to 1998 to get a jump on the market. Suddenly all of pre-war Manhattan is abuzz with talk of sweatshirts and skater pants.
Sounds funny? It is. Sort of. But as with The Coward and Verité, the inciting idea is notably better than the execution. Character is Jones’s thing as is tone and the nifty one-liner. Plotting is not. Only in his first show, Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, was so gleefully nutso that it transcended its shaky story arc. (He also does well working within the confines of scripted television, as in his writing for Orange is the New Black.) There are about 20 minutes in the second act of Important Hats that are zanily brilliant. But then there’s the rest of the play to consider.
Carson Elrod stars as Sam Greevy, a famed couturier in a hush-hush relationship with the fashion critic TB Doyle (John Behlmann). But Sam’s star wanes when the futuristic designs of Paul Roms (Matthew Saldivar) hit the streets. Roms has wrested a time machine from “the brilliant overweight scientist” Dr Cromwell (Remy Auberjonois), who “created quite by accident. Like penicillin, and cornflakes”. With this device, Paul travels to a closet far into the future and steals stray garments, marketing them as “practical clothes for regular people”. (As in most of Jones’s work, the roles for women, here played with a sardonic glint by Maria Elena Ramirez, are basically an afterthought.)
A lot of the play is 30s noir pastiche – precise, if limited – with an array of growling newspaper editors, loopy radio announcers, and chucklehead cops. It’s cute but also repetitive, and under Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s direction many of the actors seem to be straining for effect, even though they’re all successful comedians and could stand to relax a little. There are a couple of nice surprises, though, like the comparative realism of the 1998 scenes and some onstage welding that would make Marco Rubio proud.
But the play only really takes off in a second-act montage that seems to borrow equally and cheerfully from The Time Machine, Planet of the Apes and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, with a butterfly and some onanistic hominids thrown in for good measure. (The other great bit of writing, also in the second act, is a semi-improvised riff about how far Americans have let themselves go sartorially. “People wear denim in restaurants,” Sam grieves. “T-shirts in the theater.”) But otherwise a lot of the script is lacking force and zing – great design, sloppy fit.
