Welcome to our latest 3-in-1! We don't want to spoil too much, but playwright-performer Emily Stout's one-woman play Grownup is about well, growing up. Stout interviews children she has babysat over the years while also weaving in details about her own experiences with adulting. The following reflections are from three women close to the playwright, all of whom met Stout in different stages of life (elementary childhood, college, etc.). Here, they offer reflections on the work in context with the woman who wrote it.
Miriam Pensack
There is magic in growing up, though we don’t often think of it that way. As adults, we often say growing up is rough, mired with challenges and loss. We maintain that it is childhood before we do all that agonizing growing, that’s the magical part. Not so for playwright Emily Stout, who probes the matter with honesty and roaring humor in her one-woman show Grownup, currently running at Brooklyn’s MITU580.
As a theater artist, Stout does her own kind of magic. I don’t mean some general whimsical quality, but rather something that can only be explained by forces beyond logic and reason. Over the course of the piece, Stout moves in and out of vignettes crafted around interviews she conducted with real children she has babysat over the years, weaving in the children’s musings about growing up. As an actor, she incarnates these children with striking precision—a bashful girl’s awkwardly turned in toe; another’s far-away stare, searching the cosmos in her bedroom ceiling; another one’s hand placed forcefully on her hip to emphasize the way that, at that age, if we know something, we just know. Then the vignette concludes, the stage lights shift, a song comes on overhead to sweep us into the next scene, and there again is narrator Emily, who has shepherded us ever-so-nimbly back to her.
The structure of the show does its own kind of magic, the kind that can only happen inside a theater. But the relationship between form and content goes deeper still, in that the jumping between vignettes and a streamlined narration is something akin to growing up itself—to be a person who grows up is to be a time traveler, a shapeshifter, and yet somehow always oneself.
A confession: I have known Emily Stout since fifth grade when we had to clean bird shit out of the class pigeon’s cage together at Soda Creek Elementary School. I have been her audience for decades, observing her time travel and shapeshift and somehow always return to the luminous seed of herself. In the show, Emily states that she prefers children to adults. I attribute this to her singular ability to see who we are in those fleeting moments before we get in our own way—those brief windows in a conversation where, childlike, our decisions on the matter haven’t yet zapped the magic. Since childhood, Emily has had an inexplicable valence around that energy, one that radiates in her still, and with it, she ferries her audience through a world falling into place before the eyes of a child.
To be clear, the show pulls no punches on matters of loss and grief. The audience learns, as heartsick as its protagonist once was, that the whole story is building towards a kind of devastation. Who in their right mind would describe growing up as magical, one might ask, if we know that the process will at some point inevitably bring you to your knees. Emily takes you there, and just like life itself, you don’t realize that the rupture is coming. The pain of it isn’t sugar-coated, and thank god, Emily and her band of child comrades are not encouraging you to chase a silver lining. But what this crisis offers—what is made possible through the shattering of our world and our former place within it—is that same astonishing capacity to return to oneself. I know no person or artist as skilled at coming home to herself as Emily. Grownup shows us that the magic isn’t salvaging that small person you lost somewhere along the road to adulthood. It’s that she is always already here observing, and that, in the right moments, when the lighting and the cosmos align, she speaks through us again.
Mara Nelson Greenberg
At the beginning of Emily Stout’s one-woman show Grownup she tells us that she’s not that good at being a grownup, and that in many ways, she’s still a kid at heart. She tells us about third grade, when she’s already feeling nostalgic for second grade. She tells us about her early twenties, when she tries so hard to arrive at some version of adulthood but keeps stumbling along the way. Throughout, she also re-enacts interviews that she conducted with a few of the many children she’s babysat over the years. As she pitch-perfectly embodies each of them, we witness both Emily-as-responsible-grownup and Emily-as-child.
At one point in the play, we also learn that Emily’s been working on this piece for six years, searching for answers and an ending. But thanks to the way she’s created it, Emily’s play doesn’t just make do with the passage of time—it’s made better by it. In a show about growing older, Emily grows older. So do the children she’s been interviewing throughout the play. The longer she sits with and within the play, the more she’s experiencing and reporting on all of the things inside of it: We’re all still children in one way or another but we can never go back to our childhoods. We’re all forced to grow up, but there’s no such thing as being a grown up.
Also, Emily is funny. (And, by the way, she’s a good friend of mine—telling you that partly for ethical criticism reasons but mostly for name drop-y ones.) She effectively mines all of the humor that you might expect from children talking about what they think adulthood is. I laughed as nervous 11-year-old Wren said, “Growing up these days, there's lots of pressure to read scary books, and when I’m 30, I would tell myself: Wren, you don’t have to read scary books if you don’t want to!” I laughed as solemn, 11-and-a-half-year-old Vanessa explained that one of the hardest parts about growing up is that she used to have two teachers “and now I have like, ten teachers.” But at some point, after spending time with all of these different children—Emily as the children she babysits for, Emily as Emily-as-child, Emily as Emily-as-adult-child—I was no longer just a grown up with 20/20 vision, laughing knowingly at these kids who don’t understand adulthood. I was also vicariously a child (and also still an adult! And an adult-child too).
The themes of the play coalesce when Emily brings us into the hours before her father passed away. She describes her mother guiding her father’s adult self into the hands of the little boy inside him, who “didn’t always get what he needed.” This moment mirrors what Emily has been helping her audience do throughout the play: find our inner child and viscerally remember what it feels like to be a kid, all the high highs and the low lows— the happiest memories and the saddest ones, as she says throughout the play. In the final moments of the play, Emily as her father’s 7-year-old self dances with her grown father before walking into the light.
Liliana Padilla
Do you remember those letters? The ones to your future self? That your kindergarten, third grade, sixth grade teacher says they will mail to you one day! (If they’re alive, if they don’t lose the letters, if you have the same mailing address, etc…) I wrote several and never received one.
But Emily Stout did! Her one-person show Grownup opens with one of those letters.
Received by real-life future Emily! Twenty-four years later! Young Emily details the dreams of her younger self and her classmates (to be a teacher, Olympian, president, dentist).
It’s minute two of this show, and I’m already crying. I’m crying because I know the ending of this play— Emily’s father passed away months before she came to grad school, where we first met. The time travel of this letter feels heavy with this specific loss that Young Emily hasn’t lived yet. I’m also crying for all the losses we experience as we get older. The things Younger Us has no idea are coming. And I’m crying for the loss of Younger Us, their voices and dreams glimmering through Emily’s letter.
Emily, an actor and prolific babysitter, has long known she wanted to write a play featuring the voices of children. Six years ago, she began interviewing some of the kids she babysat and asked them the following questions: What are the happiest and saddest memories? What do you think happens when we die? What is the hardest part about growing up? What is advice for your 30-year-old self? Their answers, performed as verbatim excerpts by Stout, are delightful, hilarious, playful, and quite deep.
Emily’s performance of each child is double exposure. Thirty-year-old Emily does not fully become 8-year-old Lucy or 11-year-old Wren. We witness her attempt, and in that leap, we see what she can and cannot access. The gaps where Emily’s adultness reveals itself are the point. Yet, simultaneously, she is fully child-like. (Aren’t we all? And then of course, irrevocably not?)
Emily also tells us stories of her own coming of age from very young to present self. Throughout the show, Emily’s father Herald is a constant presence. His favorite songs are the soundtrack of Emily’s heart, and his advice is grounded, real and full of love. As Emily grows up, we feel her father’s love as a constant in the changing brutal world.
As Emily puts it “Most of adult life feels like taking down your Christmas tree.” Her father might retort something like “Just think, Em: in a hundred years, you’ll be dead. Have fun!”
Throughout the play, as we meet the children through epic dance numbers and interviews, the presence of death is constant. There’s the death of a pet, a Grandfather, or the ability to use your favorite blanket. One kid says that the hardest part of growing up is “friendship and death.” I agree!
As I sat in the audience (fully weeping for the most part), I reflected on how quickly childhood passed by—how quickly the freedom to play dress up alone or dance with my whole body, entirely in an imagined world, died. The presence of these children is coaxing showing me the absence of my own inner child. It’s heartbreaking I think? Or maybe it’s part of a resurrection process?
Through the show’s earnest exploration of growing up, Emily’s performance taps into a sense of play and self-deprecating, gorgeously vulnerable humor. Mary Rose Branick directs with precision and heart.
As Emily matures so does the play. And just like in life, the dramatic climax comes out of nowhere, when Herald, Emily’s father, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Emily’s telling of the “best and worst ten days of [her] life” is a generous and piercing view into the experience of losing someone you love, complete with the bleakness, divinity, and strangely hilarious moments that surround death.
The play puts life and death side by side. (Of course, they always are.) We witness the glorious child spirit of a man at the end of his life alongside the fears of children at the outset of their lives. By having one actor tell all of these stories, the show achieves a sort of quantum effect — these characters are of course all Emily, and (if I may!) all me. The day before, someone said to me “You live long enough, you play all the parts.” And Emily is certainly doing that. She is performing the dance of time travel, empathy, and prophecy in front of us.
Leaving the play, I felt old and young and broken open.
