On Identity in The Hatmaker’s Wife
The first time I read this play, I thought I was a bad Jew. I recognized a lot of the general allusions that the show makes to golems and to “the anniversary of dead people day,” but could not reconcile the play’s interpretation of them with what I knew. I thought this meant that I just didn’t know enough about Judaism and that with a little bit of research things would fall into place and I’d learn about golems of life and death and some obscure Jewish holiday honoring the dead.
I was wrong. The more research I did, the more confused I became. I was right that Jewish myths don’t portray golems the same way Lauren Yee does and that I was not forgetting a holiday I never learned about in Hebrew School. And for a while, I was frustrated with the play. I couldn’t understand why these inaccuracies existed and why Yee wrote them into the play. But then I looked up from my research and read the play again and went to a rehearsal. And I realized I didn’t care about the inaccuracies because they don’t matter. In the world of this play, golems are different than they are in our world; these ambiguously Jewish characters celebrate this ambiguous dead people day. And it works. I remembered the other emotions I felt the first time I read the play, the way that it affected me and how the ending made me cry. And I stopped worrying so much about the particulars.
Considering the play never identifies the characters as anything other than “quasi-Eastern European,” The Hatmaker’s Wife talks a lot about other facets of identity: about the relative importance of names and who makes up a family. Only one character in the play is listed by their first name (Gabe). Every other character is called either their last name (Hetchman, Meckel) or a vague title (Voice, Wall, Golem, Hetchman’s Wife). What does it mean for them to not have been given names? Do they have names at all? While for characters like Golem and Wall that may be a complicated question (or, conversely, there could be very simple answers), for Voice and Hetchman’s Wife their lack of a name is crucial to their identities. The question of Hetchman’s Wife’s name makes its way into the play, but Voice’s lack of a name is never mentioned; no one calls her by any name at all, she’s simply never addressed. Why does she not have a name, but Gabe does? Why, of all the non-name titles or nouns that she could have been referred to as, did Yee choose “Voice”?
We learn a fair amount about the breakdown of the character’s families. Gabe has a traditional family life and is expecting to continue down that path with his loving girlfriend. Voice has her adoptive parents, though their relationship seems complicated, and she has Gabe, though she doesn’t consider him to be family in the way that he thinks of her. What does this tell us about each of these characters, and does it connect at all to their (lack of) name? Does Voice not have a name because she doesn’t have a traditional nuclear family? Gabe is the only one with a first name and he has the most straightforward family. The play tells us that family is important, and we need people to love us, so perhaps they are the ones who tell us, and make us, who we are.
Once I was able to step back and stop looking at this play through the lens of my own identity, I was able to start thinking more about the rest of who these characters are. Not just their possible religion, but the bonds that may or may not tie them together and how that shapes them. I could take in the rest of the play and its messages of the importance of love and connection. Sometimes art and what it tells us and makes us feel is more important than hard facts and The Hatmaker’s Wife reminded me of that.
