Friday, April 28, 2023

We are off to Madison tonight because my cousin, Sam, wrote a play and we want to go to see it. We coordinated the timing so we can go to friends’ big band concert on the way home on Sunday. Today was such a good day at school (same school!) and we are looking forward to riding in the car (maybe one of those is stretching the truth.

Here is an article written about my cousin and his play. Enjoy.

At Seventeen, They Learned the Truth: New Strollers Play Profiles Plight of Pregnant Teens Who Had No Choice

Mike Fischer, for World Premiere Wisconsin

Madison-based playwright Sam D. White was in the middle of his first year as an actor at the Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival when he learned that he had a brother.

A big brother.

“My mom had a teen pregnancy in the 1940’s that nobody had known about,” White said to me during a phone interview. “She never talked about it to anyone, for years afterward.”

Telling his mother’s story was one of the reasons White wrote Hush the Waves, which will make its debut in a Strollers Theatre production opening this Friday and running through May 6.

In White’s play, 17-year-old Mary is shipped away to a Missouri orphanage to hide her pregnancy from her Wisconsin family’s neighbors and friends; so was White’s mother, Janet.

“It’s hard for me to think about her and what it was like for young women back then,” White said, choking up as he tried to imagine what his mother had endured. “The idea that she had no control over anything breaks my heart. It has given me great respect for my mom and other women who didn’t have a choice.”

Parallel Lives

But wait: there’s more.

Hush the Waves not only revisits the plight of White’s mother through the 1940’s character of Mary, but also tells a parallel story reflecting the teen pregnancy of White’s sister, occurring 30 years later. Liz, the 17-year-old character based on White’s sister, is weeks from giving birth when we meet her.

Unlike Mary, both Liz and White’s sister exist in a 1970’s world where abortion was newly legal. But both fictional character and real-life sibling also make their way in a world where a stigma still attached to being unwed and pregnant. By the time Liz comes forward, it is too late.

What Liz has that Mary does not is a supportive family; much of Hush the Waves revolves around the relationship between Liz, her mother, and a hothead brother, as well as an irreverent but caring male nurse who goes by the moniker Tim the Enchanter.

By contrasting the similar but ultimately distinct stories of his two 17-year-old characters, White underscores the fundamental differences between them. Mary’s story teeters toward tragedy; Liz’s ostensibly similar story flirts with comedy.

Mary receives no support from her family; Liz does. And Mary is given no choice about what will happen with the baby she bears; intent on protecting his family’s reputation, Mary’s father insists that the baby be put up for adoption. Conversely, Liz’s mother not only envelops her daughter with love, but also lets her make her own choice about adoption.

That contrast “makes me think about my mom and how awful things were for her,” White said.

Speaking of awful, I asked White if his play – which he began writing several years ago – feels different to him now, in the wake of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

“There’s been a lot of conversation in the rehearsal room about that,” White said, “and we tried to more specifically shoehorn it into the play. But it didn’t work.”

“Ultimately, this play is not specifically about abortion,” White continued, while adding that choice-related questions involving “freedom” and “autonomy” are absolutely “at the heart of the play.”

Surfing the Waves

The reverberation of such questions throughout Hush the Waves offers one way to think about White’s title: sounds of the past continue to make noise in the present, even as the waves carrying them forward lose power and force. Liz’s story echoes Mary’s story, but with a loving difference involving a more caring family.

At its most literal, the waves in White’s title refer to the contractions Mary and Liz experience as we watch them go into labor. “You can’t stop the waves,” nurse Tim tells an agonized Liz during delivery, “but you can learn to surf” them – much as both Mary and Liz must learn to surmount the difficulties being hurled their way rather than being engulfed by them.

Sounding a variation on this theme of riding out the storm, White’s title also refers specifically to an eponymously titled Gaelic lullaby (White is partial to the Judy Collins cover, even though he notes in his script that the tempo she uses is too slow for his play).

“Hush the waves are rolling in,” the lullaby (and White’s play) begin. But even as that lullaby chronicles various toiling family members caught out in the storm, it reminds us that “baby sleeps at home” – safe in a space removed from the world’s harsh adversities.

When a family pulls together, the lullaby suggests, all of its members will find their way home and sleep soundly, knowing that they’ll be protected and defended, no matter what they do or say – and no matter what mistakes they make or wrong turns they take.

“When she found out my sister was pregnant, my mom was freaking amazing,” White recalled. “She set down rules much like those made by Liz’s mother in the play: No yelling. No accusations. No name-calling and no names, including that of the boy, whomever he was. He wasn’t in the picture and never would be.”

“She told us we were going to circle the wagons,” White said.

As a result, a potentially ugly, hate-filled situation – of the sort Mary endures in White’s play – becomes instead a celebration of life lived in and with love.

In a world riven by hate – much of it directed against women and their autonomy – that’s the sort of soothing lullaby that we could all stand to hear more often. Do we want to live in a dystopia resembling The Handmaid’s Tale and threatening to drown Mary? Or do we want to build a world of the sort experienced by Liz, in which we can swim together toward calmer waters?

Hush the Waves opens this Friday, April 21 and runs through Saturday, May 6 at the Bartell Theatre, 113 E. Mifflin St., Madison. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/hush-the-waves-2/.

Meet Mike

Mike Fischer wrote theater and book reviews for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for fifteen years, serving as chief theater critic from 2009-18. A member of the Advisory Company of Artists for Forward Theater Company in Madison, he also co-hosts Theater Forward, a bimonthly podcast. You can reach him directly at [email protected].

Mike’s work as WPW’s Festival Reporter is made possible through the sponsorship of the United Performing Arts Fund (UPAF). Learn more: https://upaf.org/