On the first Saturday night of August, Vic & Lexie & Andrea went to see the new play KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA by Ariel Stess and directed by Meghan Finn, presented by The Tank in collaboration with New Georges.
Andrea & Vic met cute while picking up their tickets at the box office. They sat together and chatted a bit before curtain. Audience members who had run into familiar faces were chatting across and between rows. The Tank’s black box theater suggested a blank canvas, featuring a simple wooden platform onstage with hints of trees and stars peeking out from behind it. Lexie whisked in and out unseen, but emailed the group thread to let them know that she had been at the show. Vic went on to her next adventure of the evening, and Andrea went back to Brooklyn to continue dogsitting. The three ladies convened as a full trio on back-to-back 40-minute Zoom meetings on Sunday afternoon (Andrea only has the free version).
They spent the next 80 minutes discussing the entrapment of the patriarchy, what it means to act your age as a woman, the coinciding introduction of the iPhone and the 2008 recession, smoking as a social act, the unfair characterization of women as bad drivers, Virginia Woolf, adult sleepovers, the wolves in sheep’s clothing lurking about as so-called nice guys, and the local and personal nature of systemic change.
What follows here are the pieces that each woman went off to write after that lively conversation, tracking the character storyline(s) that most closely resembled their own life experiences or deeply resonated with them. Hop in for the ride to see the personal responses to how the rich interior lives of the titular characters are depicted as their worlds intersect and collide in surprising, laugh-out-loud and moving fashion.
Miranda (Lexie)
I’m not the biggest fan of monologues in general. Call me a hater, but I think it’s too easy to become tedious or indulgent or boring. That being said, as I walked into KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA only knowing a few plot points and that the entire play was composed of monologues, I must admit a bit of skepticism was sitting in the back of my head. As projected postcards of Santa Fe, where the play is set, rolled and each woman was introduced, Kara and Emma and Barbara and Miranda drop-kicked that skepticism far away, each welcoming the audience into their distinct internal worlds. Armed with only a handful of props and a remarkable script, the lack of theatrical glitz and glam along with the pantomime-esque staging highlighted the beauty and depth in each character’s story as they soliloquized on motherhood, the economy, grief, the woes of patronizing a vegan restaurant, and everything in between.
Among a bevy of strong characters and performances, the through line that stuck with me most was Miranda’s, played by Zöe Geltman. Personally familiar with the particular hell that can be working a retail job, I loved being privy to Miranda’s internal world as she suffered through her shift. She monologues about camping tents and one dollar cigarettes in an effort to fight impending boredom, finally finding solace–albeit short lived–in her sandwich during her lunch break. Played with the talking speed on par with a Gilmore girl and a comic sense that kept audiences rolling, Geltman guided us through Miranda’s tragedies with a much needed and appreciated lightness, making her moments of dilemma all the more poignant.
Miranda is the character that feels the most anchored to the time of the play. Set in 2008, Miranda’s day goes from bad to worse when a burst pipe and a broken phone in the middle of winter leaves her with no place to go. Her story is a scathing view of the economy then and now, where even with a full time job, a bout of bad luck can be more devastating than we realize. Having found an engagement ring months before that was never claimed, she discovers that as the employee who found it, the ring now belongs to her. In this moment of hope, her coworker, the universally loved George (Paul Ketchum), tells her that she should do the right thing and return it to the person who left it. As her day with him progresses, we come to wonder if George, though a stand up member of his Christian community and collectively deemed likable, had any right to play the moral police in Miranda’s situation.
Driving up an icy mountain to a stranger’s house on Christmas Eve with the ring in hand, by the end of the night, Miranda finds a brief moment of community, a restored sense of hope, and maybe a bit of freedom with Kara and Barbara–women she has never met but is serendipitously tied to. Her story highlights how we can lean on each other, and as she comforts a grieving Kara, she reminds us that even when we have very little, there are unexpected and more meaningful ways to give. KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA left me giggling, sobbing, and desperately needing to call my mom; when it comes to a new play in a tiny theater on a rainy night in NYC, what more could I ask for?
Emma (Vic)
Emma, played by Kallan Dana, embodies the awkwardness of coming of age at 22, a year that straddles adolescence and adulthood. We first meet the character on her house’s roof, smoking while preparing for the biggest adventure of her life: running away with Dennis, the father of the children she babysits, and husband of Kara, one of the other protagonists.
After just turning 23, I saw Emma as a symbol of the realization that a woman’s life can, at times, feel incredibly non-linear. I have my college degrees, a budding career, and an apartment to rent, but I’m still on my parents’ insurance and haven’t changed my permanent address from my childhood home. I still buy things in shades of ballet pink and have band posters all over my walls, but I also just made the exciting transition from backpacks to messenger bags. In Emma’s, she smokes because it makes her look older, yet she never left her hometown before going to Aspen. She devotes herself to this new relationship, but she spends most of her time trapped in Dennis’ car thinking about her mother. She never went to college, but at some point, she was responsible enough to be the caretaker of Kara and Dennis’ two children. Despite the Valley Girl-esque drawl of her voice, her small frame, and her emotional and material dependence on her significantly older boyfriend, she is an adult and should be seen as one.
Emma’s arc triumphs in capturing what it’s like to need both space to grow and people to support oneself. In one of the most remarkable scenes of the play, Emma finds herself yet again trapped in the passenger seat of Dennis’ car, attempting to entertain him as they return to Santa Fe for Christmas. At first, I was skeptical about their relationship’s development: I was afraid Emma would have to learn about adulthood through suffering—a common, albeit tired, conclusion made in feminist media. After all, Dennis refuses to tell her where he’s driving her, controls how much food she eats, doesn’t fix her phone, and admits he sees her as one of his children. It’s the beginning of a horror story that many people in age gap relationships may have experienced, but Dana’s portrayal carried on with exceptional grace, allowing her character to realize that independence can be found within herself. Exasperated and feeling stranded, Emma blurts out, “I feel like I only got younger!” She encapsulates this stuck-ness that comes with young adulthood: she can make lucid, eloquent arguments about male/female social dynamics, she shows enthusiastic curiosity about the world, and she can get and maintain a job, yet Dennis, her only source of support for most of the play, doesn’t take her seriously enough to answer her genuine questions, let her make her own decisions, or even leave his car. Emma’s frustration with the older adults around her treating her like a little girl was clear, especially since the men around her consistently acted like petulant children despite their ages. It’s irritating and impossible to be both “too old” to ask for help and “too young” to have any real responsibilities at the same time.
A woman’s transition from childhood to adulthood sometimes feels like a car crash, and we’re often expected to find our own means of supporting ourselves once we turn an arbitrary age of 15, 18, 21, or whenever the people around us decide. Emma’s story, which ends with her curling up next to her mother on Christmas Eve, acts like a warm, comforting hug. Growing up is a gradual process, and claiming independence doesn’t mean one has to isolate herself from her community to find it.
Kara & Barbara (Andrea)
A memory: I’m sitting at the edge of my Mom’s hospital bed. Our roles are reversed. She is the child and I am the mother quietly stroking her legs under the scratchy white blanket. I haven’t slept and need to go home to shower and eat something. “You come back for me,” she pleads. I choke back a sob, quickly find a smile, reassure her that I’ll be here first thing in the morning. “You can call me anytime. Your cell phone is charged. I’ll leave it right here on the table.” I give her a kiss on the cheek and another squeeze of her shoulder. “Bye Marmalade. I love you,” I whisper on my way out so as not to disturb her sleeping roommate. I enter the fluorescent hallway with a heavy weight in my chest, but a quickening step as I make my getaway for the night. “I wish my Mom were here,” I think. I’ll come to understand that a mother can feel like a motherless child and her daughter can become a childless mother for a time.
Kara (Meghan Emery Gaffney, making neurotic behavior compelling) & Barbara (a classic Colleen Werthmann turn as a loveable curmudgeon) are both motherless mothers. That’s about all they share in common, save for roughly the same shoe size. Kara has dropped out of her masters program to stay at home with her husband Dennis and two young boys in a big, many-windowed house at the top of a winding country road while Barbara comes and goes as she pleases from her dusty condo when she’s not working her shift as a waitress at a local restaurant (which just so happens to be owned by Kara and Dennis). Kara obsesses over the fingerprints that she has left on the stainless steel fridge while endlessly reaching for juice. Barbara smokes American Spirits and lets her 22-year-old daughter Emma bum them in passing, mostly tuning her out as stays busy hooking up with some yoga instructor with a distant daughter of his own. When making breakfast one morning, Barbara shouts upstairs to ask Emma if she wants toast, not having realized that she has run off with her and Emma’s employer Dennis. Otherwise known as “that man,” which is how Kara begins to refer to him once she realizes his infidelity and grapples with the abandonment of both her and their sons.
Emma’s return from a disastrous road trip with “that man” brings them together one Christmas Eve. Barbara has valiantly driven uphill in the snow to Kara’s secluded house to intercept and rescue Emma. Instead, she finds Miranda there on her own mission. It’s then that, amidst this awkward triangulation around a holiday platter of scones and cheese in the kitchen, Kara & Barbara bond over their motherlessness. It’s deeply satisfying for three of the women to finally share the same theatrical space because dramatic tension has been built by the fact that we out have been anticipating that they could figure everything out if only they met up and collaborated, even as they are pitted against and made suspicious of each other (You know, like the patriarchy demands to maintain power). Kara breaks down and wails how much she misses her mom who has recently died, confessing that she wasn’t strong or else why would she be gone. Barbara rubs her back and comforts her with the wildly cathartic declaration, “My mom was a bitch.” And yet she still died, when Barbara was young. She has been both motherless and a mother longer than Kara, which is maybe how she knows that she is mostly a messy one of these “human humans” above all else. These women realize that they need to keep their moms, whether dead or alive, in their hearts, full chests, even in a bad knee, in Miranda’s case. We’re never really old enough to lose our mothers.
And so, these two motherless mothers do have plenty in common after all. They don’t want to be stuck having unfulfilling sex with these interchangeable men. They want their beds all to themselves. Barbara wants Emma back home. Kara wants herself back. With the often ridiculously circuitous and haphazard help of the other women, they claw and clutch their way forward to get what they want. It’s thrilling to watch Kara kick Dennis to the curb and Barbara victoriously strike one big starfish pose in her own bed. We’re all just under one big blanket, which is how Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda are physically positioned for one final stage picture, taking turns mothering each other back to ourselves.
KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA runs at The Tank through August 17, 2024.
