Just like traditional folktales, I see a deeper meaning in The Changeling that resonates today. Mothers pray, hope and dream for their children, even before they meet them. But once the child enters the world, they are their own person and a mother's dreams become only dreams. The beauty in this story is that mother and child are learning to come together in a compromise of sorts, despite not being what the other imagined. They can still be together. Beautiful tale.

Monica Cross has sewn together a familiar feeling fairy tale world with a deep and resonant familial woe. This play provides a wonderful metaphor that stretches itself over so many different parent/child dynamics. There is a moment when you look at your grown child and realize that time simply slipped away, like it was stolen, and you furiously try to get the child you remember back. This play evokes that feeling in me.

A beautiful fable about one of the great challenges and mysteries of motherhood: we conjure a child into being, and then watch as they become someone separate from us, and different than we ever imagined. In Cross’ fairy-tale, her characters are both totemic and deeply human, evoking the tenderness and tension of the mother-child relationship with spare and impactful poetry. Depicting the messiness and contradictions of motherhood is dangerous and risky ground: Changeling ventures there fearlessly and begs you to go with it.