How BabyLove was born
BabyLove came out of an essay I wrote while I was in graduate school for creative writing at The New School (which I was doing because I had a young child and couldn’t be traveling to small regional theatres anymore, which is what I had done a lot of prior to becoming a mother, so I decided to concentrate on my writing, which I had always done, just never seriously). I was still shell shocked at how becoming a mother had changed my sexuality and how little information there was on this aspect of a woman’s transformation into motherhood. So I started writing and workshopping the essay in a class I was taking at The New School with essayist Phillip Lopate, who was invaluably helpful to me.
I also seriously need a vacation. At the time, I had a very good friend teaching yoga in Croatia. I had been to Croatia during the war in 1994 (looooong story) and had always wanted to go back, and my dream vacation is still to do the Croatian islands on the Dalmatian Coast (someday!). So I wanted to go to visit my friend but the only way that I could figure out to go affordably was by flying through London to Vienna, then taking a train to Zagreb and then it would be another 4 hours to the coast from there. My partner (my husband Ken) and I and our son Felix had only a week for this vacation and Ken argued that it would be too much traveling and not enough fun and relaxation if we were moving around so much and while I had to agree with him, I was still profoundly pissed off that we couldn’t go.
So it was late, I was online, drinking Sauvignon Blanc and supremely angry at him. I wanted to go!!! I was looking up anything that had to do with Croatia or Slovenia (where I had traveled in 1995) and I came upon this festival called Mesto Zensk/City of Women in Ljubljana. It sounded amazing: An arts festival dedicated to supporting women in the arts. A Romanian actress I knew had performed the Vagina Monologues at Mesto Zensk, and two visual artists I knew had presented their work there.
So I emailed the festival and asked how one got invited. Then followed a series of emails and I sent them my previous show 17 Guys I Fucked and the essay of BabyLove, saying that I was in the process of turning it into a new solo. (I wasn’t in the process at all, but it was in my mind as the next thing to do when I had some time, which being a mother always seemed to be never.) Anyways, after much email and, I later found out, them excessively Googling me, they invited me to do the World Premier of BabyLove at the festival.
This meant that I actually had to make it into a play!
Julie Kramer and I started rehearsing and rehearsing. I wrote a draft, then another and another. We wrote as we rehearsed sometimes, sometimes I wrote and brought pages in. We brought in a choreographer friend who is a burlesque and conceptual artist, Julie Atlas Muz.
At the same time Elyse Singer of Hourglass Group approached me about starting a laboratory for women writer-performers. Hourglass has a large network, and Elyse listened to women saying how hard it was to keep making deadlines for themselves, that solo work was lonely, and how great it would be to have a group of like-minded women. (Okay, I admit it was me.) So Elyse decided to do something about it and we created Hourglass Solo Lab in 2005. So at the same that I had to suddenly make a new solo, I was also blessed with a community of women writer-performers with whom to meet and workshop on a regular basis.
Mesto Zensk is an amazing festival with the nicest people. They put Julie and Felix and I up in an apartment and even hired a babysitter for Felix. I did interviews for all the print press and TV and was so happy to make maternal sexuality the focus of so much attention!
Exhausted and still jet lagged, we did the show to an audience whose first language was not English that had optional live translation over headphones. The tech director had told Julie beforehand, “The audience, you know, they will not laugh.” And when they laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and got silent, we knew we had a good thing on our hands.
BabyLove has evolved since then, and I performed bits and pieces all over the city at The Moth, The Liar Show (everyone always thought I was lying!), Mo' Pitkins, Galapagos, as well as at Festivals and theatres in the US and Canada. I am grateful to all those who let me share the stage with them. The show has changed every time we do it, Julie and I rehearse and add and subtract things but it still has many of the same stories we told at the National Theatre of Slovenia (oh, yes, did I mention we premiered at The National Theatre of Slovenia? Okay, I know the country is as big as Connecticut, but still…) Anyways, that’s the story of how BabyLove came to be.
And now we are so excited to be at 45 Bleecker, presented by the Hourglass Group (Elyse, Carolyn and Nina are all mothers now!) and to have the opportunity to share our work with a larger audience.
Please come to our show, bring your mother or the mother of your child, your mommy friends or your friends who have no idea what awaits them. We’ll be happy to see you.