Iron Kisses--from the Director's perspective

Sidonie Garrett, Director

Telling this story is a uniquely challenging adventure. Our playwright, James Still, gives us a beautifully theatrical play in three scenes in which two actors portray a brother and sister who each also play their mother and father. The singular, yet wholly shared experience of scene one, where the character Billy is enacting Mom and Dad, and then scene two, where Barbara, sister to Billy portrays Mom and Dad is particularly effective in letting the audience know these parents without ever meeting them.
This is a story about family and the love that sustains them through grief and loss. I find it to be universally resonant in its exploration of the relationships between parents and their children; no matter which issues this particular family faces, we know that all families struggle, that our own families have struggled. Sometime. Somehow. For a variety of reasons. It’s about how this family changes and continues to grow yet maintains their connection. It reminds me of a quote from Hemingway, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” I think we see in the world of this play that the adult children are a bit broken, but find their strength renewed in the end because they regain the strong connection that they developed in childhood. Their shared past has prepared them to face life’s difficulties and they can draw from the well of their spiritual connection to suffer grief and come out on the other side with strength. When you have someone to grieve with, you endure.
I enjoyed working with Nathan and Karen as they absorbed bits and pieces from each other’s interpretations and created Mom and Dad from physical observation, vocal shifts and each another’s more specific understanding of the same sex parent. Their work grew to make our stage more heavily populated; we started with Nathan and Karen, added Billy and Barbara and then Mom and Dad x 2!
I hope the audience finds a personal connection to the words and each character’s viewpoint and will discover a new perspective relative to their own sibling and parent/child relationships. I hope they are moved to laughter from recognition of their own experience in the lives of the characters and feel a tear in their eye from the remembrance of their own families and losses they’ve borne—and endured with greater strength.

Thanks to James Still for such a wonderful story to tell.

“Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective” Ernest Hemingway