Full-length comedy/drama, infused with magic realism
Cast size: 1 man, 2 women
An 88 year-old woman comes back from the dead to settle some unresolved issues with her grandson, but along the way, examines her own history of child abuse and her role in the intergenerational pathology of incest. Part sex comedy, part Greek tragedy, NANNA uses black comedy to examine the intimate turmoil of intergenerational incest, and to find a potential happy escape from the cyclical prison of abuse.
NANNA is a deceptively subversive play. It is an overtly sexual comedy about the covertly cyclical topic of sexual abuse, the combination of which tends to make an audience a bit nervous. Additionally, it presents the male protagonist as the victim, which I have discovered hits many buttons of learned, or perceived, “gender authority,” especially among men in the audience.

In dealing with the horrifically absurd torture of childhood sexual abuse, I wanted to show that abuse, to speak to it directly. And I wanted to make the audience comfortable enough to sit through the dark tunnels underneath the farce. My instinct to blend the seductive, heightened and fanciful surface of comedy with the toxic underbelly of childhood sexual abuse, provides the audience with a familiar safety net from which they can chart the rocky waters of that abuse.

The play focuses on the mute witness of abuse, the people who allow it to continue by turning a passive blind eye. And it burns through the pain of betrayal, to allow a healthier future by tackling head-on the endless cycle of intergenerational abuse.