Playwright Neena Beber 2025, "A Mother" Jerome Robbins Theater

 Playwright Neena Beber 2025, 

"A Mother" 

Jerome Robbins Theater

From A MOTHER:

Option 1:

JESS: I think my camp counselor Michelle knows everything, because she’s twenty years old and dropped out of college to live in Berlin doing puppet shows in a park on the west side of the wall and now because she ran out of money she’s here to direct a bunch of kids from suburban Connecticut in a musical that had been a hit before any of us had been born.

MICHELLE: Play the opposite. Think the opposite. Do the opposite.

JESS: Michelle had come back from Berlin with safety pins in the well-placed holes in her T- shirt, a nose ring, and a really excellent way of applying black kohl pencil around her eyes. She taught us that the coolest look was to apply lots of mascara and then go swimming in the lake to make it look like dirty smudgy tears.

MICHELLE: Everything artificial is less artificial if you acknowledge that it’s artificial. The best way to be real when you are doing a play is to be fake.

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Option 2:

JESS: Verfremdungseffekt. Defamilarization. Distancing Effect. And my favorite translation — Making Strange. Because it turns out 40 years isn't forever after all. I thought things would be different by now but dark times, dark times keep coming. And understanding grows at a snail’s pace, while the time given to us on earth never slows down. Except-- except here--- in the theater, where I’m still young, and about to fall in love for the first time...

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Option 3:

Camper 1: Wow. So this is what we’re doing?