After an exceptionally busy weekend volunteering with the Enloe High School Marching Band, I finally had an opportunity to see a performance of a play that was co-written by one of the most talented and amazing human beings I’ve ever known…Ms Robyne Parrish.
I met Robyne for the first time in December of 2012 at the Gilbert Theatre in Fayetteville. Long story short, my sister had asked me to come shoot a dress rehearsal at this theatre she’d just started working at a couple of months prior. I didn’t know diddly about shooting rehearsals or in low-light but Robyne (artistic director of the Gilbert at the time!) gives me one of her trademark hugs and her complete trust and faith that truly set me on the course that has changed my life in ways I’m *STILL* discovering to this day.
Through the years, she’s been a veritable irresistible force in theatrical arts…acting, directing, coaching others in the arcane stage arts…if you can imagine something happening in a theatre, she’s likely either done it or is doing it.
But of all of the projects I’ve seen her take on so far, “Still, Birth” is probably the one I’ll always think of first when I think of her.
To say that writing this play with her friend Ms Coley Campany was an intensely personal labour of love would be a grand understatement.
Sadly, the usual chaos that passes for my schedule when it comes to wrangling three kids hither and yon meant that I wasn’t able to see it when it was staged at the Gilbert during the summer series a few years ago.
Fortunately, it was staged again at the Chain Theatre in NYC a few days ago and I was determined I wasn’t going to miss it again.
I’m glad I didn’t. 🙂
In these dark times where many nefarious forces throughout our country (and indeed quite a few parts of the world as a whole) are doing their level best to exercise draconian control over women’s bodies, “Still, Birth” is that play that should be required viewing, particularly for those who would seek to legislate women’s reproductive rights into oblivion.
The stage is not particularly large and there are very few props scattered about really bringing the “less is much more” dictum fully to bear upon the audience. I’m certainly never going to be able to look at an ordinary plastic container in the same way ever again! But it really works because the stark environment and lighting brings an even more dramatic focus on what *IS* happening on stage.
You can’t help but be brought directly into the middle of the anguish experienced by the two main characters who have experienced their own form of pregnancy loss.
One who has tried multiple times to have a child of her own and is faced with a terrible diagnosis and even more distressing choices on offer when she’s tried to do everything “the right way”.
The other has experienced a spontaneous miscarriage and is walking through a personal hell of questioning whether she’s even a real woman and dealing with a significant other who can’t possibly understand the path she must walk.
The supporting cast is superb whether they’re offering the cold counsel of medical professionals that women normally experience in these situations to the support of friends and others who have also experienced their own personal form of loss.
On every level, this story is about as personal as it gets and for good reason.
What makes this experience special is that Robyne and Coley are shining a bright light on a subject where too many women suffer in silence rather than get the love and support and validation as women they desperately need at arguably one of the most difficult times of their life.
But the discussion sessions that are planned after each staging are probably even more important for the message for those who have experienced pregnancy loss that “you are not alone and you have nothing to be ashamed of” needs to be shouted and re-affirmed time and time again until pregnancy loss is no longer viewed as a heinous stigma by society.
People who know me well would probably be a bit mystified why I would go out of my way to see this play.
The answer is simple…my older sister I never had the chance to meet needed me to see this play to experience from afar that which I’d never experience directly.
She was born with a congenital heart condition called tetralogy of Fallot and only survived about fifteen minutes. Back in the 1960s, there just wasn’t anything medical science could do to save her…nowadays, they not only can repair the defects but those kids can live many years afterward.
Over fifty years later, her passing still casts a long shadow. There are those days where Mom gets a bit down and you know she’s thinking of Julianne. There’s a chasm that try as I might, I will never truly understand what it must have been like for her being learned in medicine and knowing there was no hope and having to willingly let her go in peace.
Some people would consider Mom lucky to at least get to hold her baby and say goodbye…most women who experience pregnancy loss never get that opportunity to hold their baby and find some measure of closure.
There’s the sister I never had a chance to know but I still cherish her memory and her brief life, tragic as it was, as a necessary and natural part of our humanity and our family’s story.
There’s nothing more I’d love to do than to ease my mother’s suffering these many years. What I can do is just quietly listen when she talks of Julianne which doesn’t happen that often.
“Still, Birth” has helped me understand that which I could not really understand before. And for that gift born of Robyne and Coley’s experiences, I am thankful beyond words.
If “Still, Birth” comes your way…go see it. Move heaven and earth to do so!
This world is in desperate need of stories to empower women and inspire positive action so that no more women need suffer in darkness and silence all alone in that night.