Mother’s play Leslie Dillen and Paula Plum dress for success BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	Dressed Up! Wigged Out! Written and performed by Leslie Dillen and Paula Plum. Directed by Karen MacDonald. Set by Susan Zeeman Rogers. Lighting by Karen Perlow. Original music and sound by David Remedios. Costumes by Anna-Alisa Belous. At Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through January 17.

They are some of the most indomitable forces on the planet. They are the bearers of expert advice, ruthless criticism, and the most inflexible opinions most of us ever encounter. They’re our teachers in the course of life and our crisis-management directors (sometimes also the generators of crises), and for better or for worse, every human being has one to call his or her own. They are our mothers, and Leslie Dillen and Paula Plum would like to tell us about theirs in Dressed Up! Wigged Out!, a duet of one-act, one-woman plays that the performers wrote, respectively. With equal doses of near-religious, mom-fearing devotion and wacky irreverence, both women probe the dense emotional thicket that stretches from their DNA to the deep regions of their psyches.

Dressed Up! is a tutorial in Dillen’s philosophy of life, which her daughter, Tatiana, once pressed her for. "Who needs a philosophy when you have outfits?", Dillen reasons — and she proceeds to pilot a tour through her life via vintage clothing stores and her own overstuffed closet. For Dillen, clothing doesn’t conceal the body so much as uncover an emotion that’s woven into a particular event or phase of her life. "I believe clothing carries the power of the bodies that wore the clothes and the fingers that sewed the clothes."

She takes us from her girlhood in Oklahoma City, where zipping up her tutu, the object of her affection, could make her the object of others’ adoration, to acting school in New York, where she’d slip into hot-pink Sam Shepard boots so she could be "big and strong like Sam Shepard." She often wonders who she might become with "just the right outfit," and her theatrical prowess makes the transformative power instantaneous, as when she dons Annie Hall attire and imitates her one-time classmate/confidante Diane Keaton. Whether she’s pirouetting through adolescence and meddling with love and mischief or shopping with her mom (either for fashionable dresses in London or for a nursing home on the West Coast), there is a blazer or a pair of pumps on hand to serve as a microscope.

The tailor’s dummies perched on the perimeter of Susan Zeeman Rogers’s sepia-tinged, deliciously vintage detail-centric set stand like watchful, protective spirits in both works. Their costumes are changed to a pink housecoat and a camel wool suit for Plum’s Wigged Out!, a more straightforward confessional that blurs midlife crisis with adolescent attitude, unconditional love with ravaging contempt, and solemn reflection with impulsive neurotic tendencies. Plum’s monologue uncovers a caldron of emotions that bubble as she rummages through her recently deceased mother’s mounds of stuff. With each curio and bundle of junk she unearths, a surge of memories is unleashed, and her script weaves reminiscences of childhood and her parents’ relationship into the story of caring for her cancer-riddled mother, Rowena, in the last days of her life, a task described as being a "chaperone on her date with death."

Rowena is an eternally flirty, chirpy glamor gal who didn’t let age or morphine interfere with her beauty regimes or her firm authority. "She may be high as a kite, but she’s still the queen bee, still trying to tell me how to live my life," Plum deadpans. One observation that isn’t spoken outright yet hangs over the proceedings like a lead ball bearing was concisely articulated by Oscar Wilde: "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his." Plum actually transforms before your eyes, and not just superficially, when she dons Rowena’s weird wigs or eccentric feathered caps. She embodies the prim matron with casual urgency, as if mimicking her could help the daughter cope with the loss. Plum’s instincts as both writer and performer allow her to telegraph unspeakable despair with simple words and gestures, and she punctures the gloom with savage humor and biting irony.

Karen MacDonald directs to ensure that the scripts are treated as both tender tributes and showcases for the actors. Even seemingly cliché’d moments convey layers of implications. In these well-matched pieces, Dillen and Plum bring the photo albums of their minds to life with a sort of theatrical Midas touch. It’s enough to make their mums proud.