THEATRE
One evening in 1988, when I was 28, my brother Pete and I were having dinner at my dad's house. In the middle of a sentence, my dad's body froze. His eyes went blank, and he was staring at the finger he had been pointing with when he had been speaking. Pete and I didn't know what was going on. We yelled at him and shook him, trying to snap him out of it, but there was no reaction. So we called 911 and waited. As we were waiting, I turned to Pete and said, "I'm not sure what a stroke is, but I think that's what this might be."
It was.
While I didn't know what a stroke was, I came to learn a lot over the next days, weeks, months, and years.
At the time, I was a member of a theatre company in Chicago, The Theatre Collective, and I was taking a playwrighting class. The two pieces of writing on this page were theatre pieces inspired by my experiences with my dad during his recovery from the stroke.
"Welcome" is a one-act play sparked from a conversation I had with my dad in his hospital room. As he and I talked, he looked at me directly and said, "Why can't you just get your act together?" This comment infuriated me, and I went home and wrote down all of the reasons why I "couldn't get my act together." When I showed my writing to David Sinkus, my partner in The Theatre Collective, he understood that the writing was a cathartic exercise for me, but he made it clear that if we wanted to produce it as a play, it would have to include my dad's perspective.
David's advice led me to engage in long-avoided conversations with my dad about my childhood. These conversations were challenging, but we stuck with them. Our dialogue made the play much better, and, more importantly, they helped us come to a better understanding of one another. I will always be grateful to David for pushing me to have those conversations.
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At around the same time, I took a playwrighting class at Victory Gardens Theatre. I received an assignment to write a short piece that included a twist. On the day it was due, I had written nothing. So as I rode the El train to class, I quickly wrote “Reading.” I read it on stage to the class that night, and they connected with it, so I didn’t change a word from that last-minute El train writing session.
I added watercolor images to the text, and I gave it to my dad for a Christmas present. The piece below is the original text and art, yellowed due to years of storage.