Touching on the Unspoken

With our Chautauqua residency almost a month past, I have been thinking back over what we learned from our whirlwind week. The most surprising lesson I learned from our presentations what exactly how hard this piece hits its audience. After our 2 presentations, we had the most intimate, positive, productive talkbacks I've ever experienced as a theatre maker.

Our audiences recognized themselves in the play, and they recognized their children in the play. While this, in itself, isn't abnormal, the subject matter of the play touches on conversations and experiences people tend to keep very private. Couples do not usually tell people they are trying to get pregnant. Couples do not usually tell people they are pregnant until after the 1st trimester. While this is for a perfectly rational reason, it means that when there is loss, that loss is much much more lonely.

Have you ever heard men in their 70s and 80s share with a full room of people how helpless they felt after their wives’ miscarriages? I have now.

We had numerous women, of a wide variety of ages, explain to us exactly what loneliness and loss the abstract gestures in the play meant to them and tear up while they told us.

If I ever worried the play was only for an audience in their 20s an 30s, I no longer harbor that concern. This play was biting and meaningful to audiences who chose, and did not choose, long ago whether or not to have children.

By bringing these private joys and sorrows into a public setting, we offered recognition and solidarity to our audiences. Armed with this power of the play, I look forward to us taking it even further.