Playwrights Realm Presents the World Premiere of Anna Moench's MOTHERS

The Playwrights Realm opens a game-changing 2019-2020 season with the world premiere of Anna Moench's Mothers, directed by Vampire Cowboys Co-Artistic Director Robert Ross Parker(September 13-October 12, at The Duke on 42nd Street, a New 42nd Street project). Moench begins Mothers as a satirical comedy of manners, then daringly explodes the form, examining what happens when a group of mothers (plus a nanny and a father) are thrown into circumstances far beyond their control. In conjunction with Mothers, the Playwrights Realm proudly pilots the Radical Parent-Inclusion Project, which seeks to dismantle the barriers preventing parent-artists from succeeding in the theater by illuminating, creating, and tracking new pathways of access and approaches to production.

Mothers is set in a Mommy & Me group rife with upper-middle-class malaise. Here, despite relative privilege, the social and biological pressures of parenting are nonetheless wholly consuming, and even small talk becomes a charged, fraught competition: whoever's the most devoted to her family, has the best-behaved child, and the most satisfied husband wins. But beyond the mild-mannered jabs deployed within this comfortably suffocating bubble, the world seems to be on the brink of far less subtle violence. As the chaos outside encroaches on the group's turf, passive aggression falls by the wayside, and each mom will have to decide just how much she loves her child.

Mothers is the first full, professional New York production for San Diego-based playwright and TV/film writer Anna Moench, whose "funny, creepy and unflinchingly observed" (Los Angeles Times) comedy Man of God was staged in Los Angeles earlier this year. Moench began her early playwriting career in New York nearly a decade ago, participating in various fellowships and development programs before relocating to pursue her MFA at UCSD. While there, she and her husband decided to start a family. Moench felt compelled to write Mothers eight months after giving birth to her son, during a period of sleep deprivation; she had been reading the news late at night to keep herself awake while nursing. While holding her own infant, she encountered an article in The New York Times about the Myanmar genocide and a woman whose eight-month-old had been pried from her hands and thrown on a fire.

"This woman and I are two people who gave birth at the same time on the same planet, yet our lives are so radically different. Still, the membrane between our realities is quite arbitrary, it all comes down to where you happened to be born, who's in power at the time, and whether you're in the right group or the wrong one," explains Moench. "This was also around the time that US tensions with North Korea were ratcheting up. I lived under the launch route for Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego, and fighter jets were flying over our apartment with increasing frequency. I had a realization that while I was completely focused on this little person whose needs dictated my every moment, large-scale things were happening all around me that I had very little control over yet could completely reshape my life. The play became about all of this-of the very real difficulties even for middle and upper-middle-class women raising infants-and how much harder it is for women who have much greater financial and geopolitical pressures on them to do the exact same thing, to be a person and support and protect your children."

This "membrane" that surrounds the privileges of birth, location, and circumstance, and can so easily enable us to distance ourselves from the world around us, is at the very center of the play. Mothers provocatively examines the insidious hierarchies of race, gender, and class that divide our experiences-the primal heartache of raising children in a disintegrating world.

The Playwrights Realm seeks not only to spark discussions surrounding issues explored in their plays-but also to ask themselves how, as an institution, their creative process can actively reflect these conversations. The unprecedented Radical Parent-Inclusion Project (RPI) will be integrated deeply into the casting, rehearsal, and production process of Mothers. This initiative launched by Playwrights Realm, in association with Parent Artist Advocacy League for the Performing Arts (PAAL), seizes on the Realm's core value of reflecting "the full spectrum of humanity," understanding the socio-economic realities of parenting as an issue of equity and inclusion.

RPI aims to confront the challenges of working parents in the performing arts by applying the best practices of support within every facet of this high-end Off-Broadway production. This includes: family-friendly scheduling (5-day, 6-hour-per-day work weeks); the provision of free child care during auditions and rehearsals; intentional hiring of parent-artists; welcoming children into the space at specific moments; increased support for parent-artists during high-demand episodes such as tech week and opening night; and family friendly housing for Moench while she's in New York.

"RPI does not aim to 'solve' the problem of children," says The Playwrights Realm's Producing Director Roberta Pereira, herself a mother. "For those who choose to be parents, children are a fulfilling and important part of their lives and in many ways, make them better artists. We want to celebrate that, encourage visible parenting, and make life a little bit easier for everyone."

Moench adds, "Being at grad school when I had my son allowed me to continue moving forward and growing as a playwright while starting my family-it opened my eyes to what's actually possible if you do give people the support they need. When your needs are met, having kids doesn't break you or damage you or ruin you-I'm now writing about things that are bigger and matter more to the world and to me. With The Playwrights Realm production of Mothers, we aim to reflect the values that are at the heart of this play by hiring women, people of color, and, of course, parents-the same people who face systemic obstacles in their careers in the arts. I hope we can model the kind of world in which we aspire to be living-as the play itself is an unsparing indictment of the one we're in."