Mary Lynn Owen

Finalist, American Blues Theatre Award 2025
Finalist, O'Neill National Playwrights Conference 2022

Six months after Father’s death, Mother sends an ALL-CAPS email to her adult children, ordering them home to collect their things. Brother and Sister, each with their own ALL- CAPS agendas, arrive to find the stuff of their childhood crammed into boxes, Father’s belongings in a box in the corner, and Grandpa just as alarmed as they are to learn that Mother is tossing in the towel and “heading west” the very next day. In the twenty four hours that follow, the family will face what they’ve each boxed up through the years: things said and unsaid, grief borne alone, and the wonder of Stevie Wonder. As they fight to let go and fight to hold on, what can they find worth saving?

In the wee hours, a woman bakes bread, determined that her mother’s incomprehensible recipe will finally work. But something is different about this night. The ingredients of Time and Memory keep interfering, tumbling out of cabinets, drawers, the refrigerator, and finally the oven as the bread-baking process, all in real-time, reveals the messy business of bread-baking and of love handed down, mama to hija, and generation to generation.

A play about sex. And death. And gender roles. And Scrabble.

Nella, a middle-aged, mid-level talent agent, and the middle sister between Carmen and Charlotte, is smack in the middle of a middling life. She spends her days talking clients into B-movie acting jobs, her nights talking her husband into looking up from his cellphone, and her Friday Night Game Nights - “Fun Fridays” - talking her sisters and in- laws into just playing nice. After sending her widowed mother on a cruise to the fjords, a medial diagnosis makes it plain: Nella might just be dead inside. That’s when Eleanor and Franklin, failed members of the Marital Restitution Program, arrive on a late night assignment to Nella’s dreams, and soon Nella’s Restitution is the main event - Eleanor sees to that - with No More Secrets the first order of business. One botched Scrabble Game later, it appears that Charlotte and Carmen have secrets too. And that Mom might not be where they think she is. And that Nella might just re-cast herself in the role of a lifetime.

There is dancing. There are twinkling stars. There are women making it up as they go.