The Time My Mother Wrote A Professionally Produced Play About Our Family
It was…awkward
I have wanted to write about this for years, but I’ve hesitated because of feeling at cross purposes.
I could not be more proud of my Mom. She is endlessly creative. Like most great artists who interject their life experiences into their art, my Mom does this masterfully as a playwright. All of her plays are based on her own experiences. Critics have praised her for how she can weave comedy, pathos, and the humanity of her characters into fully-dimensional creations audiences resonate with. She has written plays about her own coming of age as a young adult, her career as a playwright professor, menopause, my wonderful late great-aunt, and many other subjects. I love her work. It moves me emotionally.
She teaches playwriting at a university, and her students adore her. I’ve seen it; they rush up to her like she is a movie star.
However, one play she wrote was about raising me. It was about how raising me impacted her marriage with my Dad.
The Marriage Spectrum
The Marriage Spectrum is about Mike and Beth Rosen raising their only child (guess who else is an only child) named Andy. Andy has some significant issues. He’s got differences that his classmates or his teachers do not understand. Beth and Mike have different philosophies about how to raise their child, who is an unbeknownst autistic individual going through the special education system until age six when he gets a diagnosis. When Beth and Mike suspect Andy might be autistic, Beth feels ashamed. “I just hate that label, autism. It’s like wearing a scarlet letter. I’m afraid if people know, they’ll put him in a box and not see him for who he is.” She thinks of Andy as a “puzzle” that she cannot figure out. She is apprehensive about whether he will get married and his future, but all of this is borne out of her love for him. She is reluctant to disclose his diagnosis to others. Andy’s puppet friend Lamby (my actual puppet friend in preschool) can be told Andy is autistic as an exception.
Mike is more laid back in his approach to parenting. Que sera sera. Andy is a good kid. If he is autistic, we’ll figure it out. Let us parent him according to his own pace and his needs, says Mike. Mike is an ubermench. He has endless optimism and patience regarding Andy’s development.
Beth does fight for her son to be included, correcting a teacher who calls autism a “disease.” She advocates for her son fiercely but has private internal battles. Beth is a novelist who says that raising her autistic child takes a lot of energy, which may be a reason for her writer’s block. Beth thinks Mike enables Andy by doing some of his chores when Andy can do them himself. She thinks Mike should stop proofreading what he writes for class and stop letting him wear Velcro. The kid should learn how to tie his own damn shoes. Mike holds his ground.
But when Andy has a panic attack regarding socializing at his Bar Mitzvah party (this did not happen in real life…it happened in other instances, but not at my Bar Mitzvah), Mike and Beth obviously disagree about how they co-parent their way through this. This spirals into more parental disagreement and a massive fight regarding their respective philosophical approaches to parenting.
In Act II, Beth resents the time Mike spends with Andy. She begrudges the money it takes for the two of them to go on trips, while Beth is dissatisfied that she is not getting the intimacy she deserves.
Beth and Mike have a session with Andy’s therapist, with his permission. Mike thinks Andy might feel more comfortable at a community college to start, while Beth wants him to go away to college and be at a school where he can fulfill his potential.
Andy finally chooses to go away to college in freshman year (as I did) with his therapist’s blessing, who sees Andy as kind, sensitive, super-intelligent, and, yes, challenging.
As the play ends, Beth and Mike have just dropped off Andy at college, and they are nervous wrecks. Andy has made no friends throughout high school; how will he conquer his Mt. Everest? Beth tells Mike that she reassured Andy he can always go to the library if he needs to be alone. Beth has grown; she finally realizes she needs to “let Andy be Andy.” The tone is incredibly bittersweet.
Just before the play fades to black, they notice the red light blinking on the answering machine. They know it is Andy and are dreading the message. Andy says…” Hi, Mom and Dad, it’s Andy.” That’s it. Clair de Lune by Debussy plays as the curtain comes down.
My Mom took some creative liberties with this play. The Civil War was not a special interest of mine. I did not have a best friend in high school who was Indian. I was diagnosed at age twenty-seven with autism but had many of the same challenges as Andy and numerous different labels. And I question whether my Mom actually had the kind of anger Beth did regarding the fact that my Dad and I spent so much time together in real life. Yet if she changed the names and circumstances of certain things that happened, she left a lot in there that was true to form. Most of the play had a factual basis of reality behind it.
Beth was such an unlikeable character to me. She definitely was not someone who I wanted my Mom to pattern herself after. I love my Mother, but I hated this “Beth.” Yet, if I am being honest here, the parental dynamics were, in fact, the same in real life as the ones in the play. Mike was the good guy parent, and Beth was the bad guy. And again, while I love my Mother with all my heart and soul, she truthfully expressed our family dynamics.
Beth’s struggle and depression over Andy’s differences were hard to stomach being dramatized. I hated Beth’s attitude toward Andy because of his autism and his differences. I believe my Mother when she tells me she might have overdramatized the character of Beth for theatrical effect. But there was a foundation of truth on which the character was based. This stung me on a particular level.
After reading the play’s script, I kept my feedback to myself. I had many talks with my therapist about this, and he thought it would be unproductive to say anything. So I didn’t.
The play would have been produced on stage were it not for COVID-19, but it still received a production. It had been given several professional readings pre-Covid, including at the Purple Rose Theatre, which actor Jeff Daniels founded. Instead, the play had a YouTube production with Oakland University in Michigan, where several hundred viewers watched live and with equity actors being cast for the four roles.
As the YouTube production drew nearer, I did express some concerns to my Mother. Doing so was selfish, but I had kept so much bottled up for a long time. She was genuinely taken off guard because I waited so long. Why didn’t I say anything earlier?
Watching the YouTube production as the play ended and hearing Andy’s voicemail call from college with the Clair de Lune piano music playing as the curtain went down, I cried my f*cking eyes out. It was an autobiography of her parenting and their marriage put out for public consumption, with the central character always being off-stage (me).
I did not know how to process the experience. The play was responded to quite enthusiastically by those who watched it.
“What did these audience members think?” — I asked myself. Did they think I came between my Dad and my Mom by being their son? That my Mom was initially repulsed that I had differences, but learned to accept them? That I took a lot of energy away from my Mom, which might have distracted her from her career? I did not want any of the audience members to think any of these things might be true.
It has taken me a few years to let the dust settle, but this is where I stand now.
My Mom was writing about her experiences, not mine. The play was not really about Andy at all. Andy never appears on stage. It was about my Mom and Dad and how they processed events in their marriage, even if Andy was the foil in the story. Her lived experience made for good theatre. Whether or not she took creative liberties and made the Beth character much more intense than her own experiences, they are valid. Many other parents felt the play struck a chord with them — they felt seen and heard. I guess that this is the point of the theatrical experience — to give the audience members a voice and let their experiences be represented on the stage. My Mother offered the parental perspective of sacrifice borne out of love for one’s child. I am proud of her, even as the play stung me a bit. I know my Mother’s unconditional love is everpresent and that she would do anything for me and vice versa. The play did not make me doubt her unconditional love.
And though the play stung personally, I would be honest to God proud of her if it were to be produced on an actual stage in the post-Covid era. I am secure enough in myself to let my Mom’s truths be presented for the world to see.
