This is a play about friendship, parenthood, and unconditional love, and about what happens to us as we navigate seismic changes in our lives. How we choose to change—or not. What we choose to sacrifice—and don’t. How being a human is a lifetime of reckoning with change. It’s a story about the ways we choose to piece ourselves back together over and over again in order to adapt, and how we manage to traverse those changes alongside and with those we love—even when they are changing too.
In this new year full of change, I find myself often thinking: I sure don’t know where we’re going, but I want to make certain that we are going there together. It’s maybe never seemed more important to me to be in community and to support those who need it most. Though I certainly also remember feeling similarly when I was in the delicate, desperate, sleep-deprived months after having a baby. My smart, funny, wonderful friends and family saved me then in so many ways. Isn’t it ironic that the experience of new parenthood can feel so lonely when it is something that so many people go through? There’s something about the isolation of it that has a very specific weight, and something especially profound about finding solace from that feeling in the company of someone who knows exactly what you’re going through. While the unconditional love of deep friendship in early parenthood is a particularly good example of the power we have to lift each other through times of challenge and change, I hope this story reminds us all how transformational connection and community can be, regardless of the individual details of our personal story. We are all in this together.
Photo above by Casey Gardner Ford: Matt Baum and Jennifer Brown. Costumes, John Merritt. Set, Ryan Bradburn. Lights Elisabeth Cooper. Props, Courtney Loner