About

This is about theatre, I promise.

I tenderly tread down the steps of my front porch. My husband rushes to the car, bags in hand, ready for this moment. Before loading my throbbing body into the back of our small, red Hyundai, I pause to gape at the moon. She is bright, low and wide open in the September sky. I hum to myself, “Babies are born under moons like this.” I feel a strong kinship with the billions of women who have gone before me, howling into the night like wolves.

Hours later as my child emerges, still wrapped in her pink, translucent sack, they call it a mermaid birth. They say sailors used to pay hard earned wages to possess the sack of a child born like this, believing the soul of this child born in her own water would spare them from a watery grave. I don’t believe the old wive’s tail, but I appreciate the magic it carries. Magic is the only word I can think of to describe this experience. The moon, the night, the world has labored with me to welcome this squirmy, wailing creation into its arms.

I love birth. It is messy, honest, humbling and all-consuming. It takes all of my focus and strips away every ounce of ego. It is the ultimate creative act.

I did cheat a bit.

Before I became a mother myself, I saw firsthand what birth was like. While living and working in New York City in the early years of my career as a director, I found doula work. I held hands, cooled sweaty foreheads, and offered millions of hip squeezes. I also spent hours with the parents ahead of the birth, getting to know their fears and desires, coaching them through birth strategies and decisions, and reminding them over and over again that we cannot control the outcomes but we can choose how we show up. I often tell my clients that birth takes us to the limits of ourselves, birth exists in the liminal space between life and death - and if we cross this threshold with the support we need, we can bravely look death in the face as life emerges from us. Irish poet and writer John O’Donahue says it better:

A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies towards the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. - John O’Donahue, Benedictus

We show up and get out of the way.

Directing a play is unsurprisingly similar to supporting a birth. We breath together. We sway our hips and howl to the moon. We die to our ego, and we move toward a “real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.” As a director, I hold hands, offer guiding language, and stand ready for tearful discoveries. I spend hours getting to know the text, the artists, the team and reminding them that control is an illusion. What we are birthing has a life of its own. We support the story we are telling, we show up with our full, honest selves, and then we get out of the way and watch the magic happen.