‘You Must Wear A Hat’ @ Echo Theatre

—Martha Heimberg

It’s 84 degrees in the shade on the shores of White Rock Lake, and we’ve barely reached March. What is going up besides the temperature?

For one thing, Echo Theatre is mounting the world premiere of You Must Wear a Hat at the Bath House Cultural Center, literally a stone’s throw from the blue waters of White Rock Lake. (Is it warm yet?)

And appropriately, playwright C. Meaker’s touching, melancholy fantasy about catastrophic global warming imagines what two stranded strangers might do as they sit near a shore and count down the two hours of runtime ‘til Doomsday.

Strong performances and Hadley Shipley’s astute direction give the plight of these castaways a mounting sense of urgency.

When the lights go up in the intimate space, we see shelves stocked with bright, beautiful hats in many styles. Rows of flowers, rolls of ribbon, and all sorts of geegaws are on hand to assemble still more hats. The program tells us that we are in a millinery shop on the Great Barrier Reef. Sure enough, we see small white columns representing bleached coral on either side of the stage, with pink and green and yellow shapes glowing luminously as the corals come ever-more-near extinction in Liz Ware’s inventive set design.

Petra Milano’s sound design includes rhythmic ocean waves and ominous thunder, accompanied by lightning and other flashing lights designed by Caroline Hodge. There’s a table on wheels for hat assembly and meals, and a tea pot with buckets nearby, to carry water from somewhere offstage to make tea.

Tuesday (smiling, bouncy Cameron Casey) and Weeks (somber, deliberate Dahlia Parks) are making hats for each other or anyone else who might wash ashore, because you must wear a hat—or risk melting into a puddle in the terrible heat outside their enclave. True, they’ve been there a long time and haven’t seen another person, but they need work to do and the hats just might save the day — or the species, if there’s someone still around interested in survival.

Once in a while they catch sight of The Rabbit (a pastel-colored rod puppet manipulated by Henri Sudy and created by Ash Peterman), hopping warily around the reef. He hasn’t yet come for a hat, though. (Have they considered two holes in the crown?)

Casey’s Tuesday is the enthusiastic, chatty optimist whirling comically around the digs, wearing a top hat and tails over their grungy shorts and worn hiking boots. They want to throw an apocalypse party. They love talking about themselves and would love to be a magician, if only they could make a coin vanish properly and pull a real live rabbit out of the hat.

Parks’s Weeks is the reluctant realist of this non-traditional odd couple. Pursing her lips and staring a hole through poor Tuesday, she claims she can’t remember how she arrived on the scene, and just wants to get on with the business of hat making. She set out for the reef as a marine biologist, but by the time she arrived there was little alive to study. The exhausting heat is a bummer, but Weeks does take delight in getting a glimpse of tiny clown fish in the warm waters.

And she’s clearly on the side of The Rabbit when her reef-mate talks of catching the only other living creature around.

The charm of the show is not only in the fun hats, but in the shyly advancing friendship of these gender-fluid characters as the days go by. They sleep head-to-head on a rolled out blanket, and only gradually begin to figure out how to relate to each other, with a hand touching a hand, or the gift of a hat. Tuesday’s mad rush of words—meant to be a declaration of love—comes out sounding like a frightening wish to cut off Weeks’ hand and hold it forever. It’s not easy being a magician-in-training.

T. S. Eliot wrote of the world ending “not with a bang but a whimper.” How about a hop? Does a pair of long ears qualify as a hat—or only the hook(s) to hang one on? Cocktail attire is encouraged, as we’re told, but You Must Wear a Hat to this very inclusive party at the end of the world.

WHEN: February 27-March 14, 2026
WHERE: Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Drive, Dallas
WEB: echotheatre.org