THE FRONT SEAT, BY DIRECTOR MIKAEL BURKE

Growing up.

One day, you’re a kid, and then suddenly you’re not. How did it happen? When did it happen? How do you know when you’ve grown up? Are you grown when you graduate high school? When you get your driver’s license? After your bar mitzvah? When your facial hair starts to grow? When you have the talk? When you’re no longer afraid of the dark? Or, perhaps, when you sit in the front seat of the car with your dad on the family road trip for the first time?

My dad loved road trips. Loved. Them. Every summer we’d go somewhere wild and new and strange, involving being in the car for hours or days. But looking back, one particular trip sticks out to me. I don’t remember where we were going, but the getting there I’ll never forget. I was probably 11 or 12, and I was sitting in the front seat for the first time. My dad and I were talking, and all of a sudden I realized we weren’t just talking about nothing, or one of us talking while the other just half listened. We were having a real conversation, about music and school and “being while black” and pressure and “the man,” and I remember suddenly feeling so mature, so grown up. In a way it felt like a rite of passage. I had transitioned from boy to man through riveting conversation and the sacredness of the front seat.

When I first read this play, it was Kenny’s similar front-seat rite of passage that immediately struck me, and became my touchstone for the whole play. This is a story about growing up. It is a rite of passage in which we see Kenny go from childhood innocence to the beginnings of adolescence and manhood, against a backdrop of monsters—both seen and unseen, imaginary and all too real. The whole weird Watson tribe wants nothing more than to keep one another safe, and in this pursuit, Kenny and his family find themselves in the midst of our country’s most monstrous legacy: racism. And this monster forces Kenny to grow up. He cannot unsee what he’s seen or unlearn what he now knows. But as he moves through his trial by fire, he learns that his family is the sword and shield that allows him to overcome the monsters that haunt him.

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The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963 is on stage through March 7, 2020.
​Tickets available at irtlive.com. 

MOVING FORWARD
BY JANET ALLEN, EXECUTIVE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

The Baby Boom generation grew up thinking they’d somehow never grow old. Morning After Grace penetrates that absurdity, even while holding its fallacy in forgiveness and understanding. Few plays chart this territory: a middle ground between loss and surrender. Much hope and life are possible there, but it can require a fierce negotiation—with the world, with one’s body, in one’s relationships, even with one’s memories—a negotiation that earlier phases of life did not seem to require. Going on against great odds, when the past seems to outweigh the future: that is the task at hand for the characters in this charming and insightful play.

Angus, Abigail, and OIlie are unlikely confidantes. They are thrown together by circumstance and chance, and a large part of the impact of the play springs from that sense of the unknown. What will they choose out of these odd circumstances? What will they learn? What do they tell each other simply because they think there is little chance they will actually develop friendships? How does age loosen their tongues? There are puzzles upon puzzles in these characters. We are drawn into their explorations of one another because the chance of their connection ignites a kind of brutal honesty that is rare in human interaction—and that is particularly potent in the theatre.

How do we negotiate and survive the loss of our past? That is largely the question of the play. For a generation who was taught to seize and make their own power, reckoning with loss of power can be devastating. It very nearly is so for Angus. But Abigail and Ollie’s different brands of courage cause Angus to see the world anew—or at least to want to try to do so. Aging is hard, we know. But aging with open-hearted acceptance is an even harder path. And that path can only be negotiated by keeping old friends—or finding new friends—who will walk the road with you, flaws and scars and all.