The Hat

2015

Zillah escaped almost certain death as a toddler during WWII having been smuggled from Poland on a kinder-transport to a Swiss orphanage. At war’s end no one came for her. She grew up to be a wanderer, beautiful but cold, a photographer with an international reputation for her portraits of death camp survivors. Now, decades later, Zillah has returned to Poland to show at a gallery near Auschwitz and to photograph the camps that have loomed so large in her life.
At all her shows she exhibits a photo of herself as a child being helped onto that train to Switzerland. It is her only picture of her mother, which she shows everywhere hoping against reason that someone might recognize the woman in the big black hat with the three white circles and say, “I knew her!”
An old woman in a babushka, Yanina, comes to the gallery, studies the photo and Zillah, and departs, leaving behind a shopping bag. In it: The hat with the three white circles. Simon, Zillah’s manager and the patient man who loves her, pursues the old woman to learn the truth for Zillah. What he finds is so shocking a secret that it challenges the strength and quality of Simon’s honor and his love for Zillah.
Winner of the first annual Playwrights’ Forum, The Hat is a full-length drama in two acts, written by Santa Fe resident, Dianna Lewis.
Starring Barbara Hatch, Elias Gallegos, Jerry Maher, and Danette Sills.