Maternal material
By Casey Gillis on Oct. 22, 2008
(434) 385-5525
The title came first for playwright and stand-up comedian Karen Gray: “Oh Crap I Forgot to Have Kids.”
“It was one that percolated for awhile,” the Pennsylvania resident says about her latest one-woman show, which she’ll bring to Nellysford’s Hamner Theater this weekend (see box for details).
The show poses questions about how motherhood figures into what it means to be a woman and an adult.
“It was an issue that a lot of women deal with. You look and say, ‘Where is this going to fit in?’” she says. “(And) what if, for some reason or another, that isn’t something you end up doing?”
This is the fourth one-woman show Gray has penned and, like most of her work, it combines elements of fantasy with her own real-life experiences.
“Even if the characters aren’t real, they come from (some aspect of) my life,” she says.
Gray started honing her comedic skills at a young age.
“I always considered myself, probably, (to be) a really tragic figure,” she laughs. “I cried a lot. But no one was interested in my whining, so I had to turn it into jokes.”
She got involved in theater in high school, but when it came time for college, Gray was ready for something new. She studied creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and, after graduating, went back and forth between writing and acting before combining the two.
“I really wanted to be in more of a theatrical setting, but I wanted to be doing my own material,” says Gray, a three-time recipient of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship.
She continued doing stand-up, opening for acts like Damon Wayans, Robert Klein and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and spent several seasons acting at the Allenberry Playhouse and Resort Inn, one of the country’s longest-running professional theaters.
IF YOU’RE GOING
WHAT: ‘Oh Crap I Forgot to Have Kids’
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday/Saturday
WHERE: Hamner Theatre, in the Rockfish Valley Community Center in Nellysford, 190 Rockfish School Lane
TICKETS: $10. The show contains adult themes and is intended for an adult audience.
INFO: (434) 361-1999 or http://www.hamnertheater.com
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