"Well" opened the season Friday night for the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center's Cabot Theatre. It was a strong start for the new season, each play of which will examine some aspect of "family."
The play is really a "multi-character theatrical exploration" of health and wellness within individuals and a community ... or at least that is what sets out to be. It ends up cutting through the pretext, however, and getting a little more personal.
The work speaks to issues I currently explore within my own life. Adult daughters and their mothers -- I think we all have conversations we need to have but somehow manage to avoid. I, for one, know just what I have to say, but I just don't want to go there. It can just be so intense. Certainly, there must be a way around it. Yet I know I would feel a lot better if I could just put the cards on the table. Sound familiar? It is personal -- but it is also universal.
"Well" gets into the grit of family -- the beliefs, values and habits that are passed to us from our tribe and that mold and form us. We accept them until we realize we can actually choose what to keep and what to toss. The wild card, however, is that sometimes folks get stuck with things that they do not have power over. They did not choose it, but they cannot loose it.
It makes me think of that serenity prayer: "God grant me the power to change the things that I can, the courage to accept those that I cannot and the wisdom to know the difference."
At one point, a character expounds upon the fact that healthy people think that being sick is like being healthy, but you are sick on top of it, and that if you just try hard enough somehow, you can regain health. She continues to explain that being sick is actually the lack of being healthy, which is actually an entirely different state of being. Healthy people cannot imagine what they do not have, because they have always had it. Which makes it difficult to be compassionate, I guess.
Ah, yes, life is complicated. It cannot be neatly compartmentalized, and some things are almost next to impossible to understand. It's true. Mothers and daughters, parents and children, come from the same stock and there can be good in the commonality, but inevitably the children branch out in their own direction -- and that is how it should be.
All this, and "Well" is still laugh-out-loud funny.
Jessica Laub was born in Milwaukee in the spring of 1970, thereafter spending her childhood days enjoying the summers on the shores of Lake Michigan and winters at the toboggan chute in Brown Deer Park.
Alas, she moved away to broaden her horizons, and studied out East for a few years at Syracuse University. After a semester "abroad" at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, she graduated with a B.A. in English and advertising.
After college, she worked at Glacier National Park, a ski hill in Steamboat, Col. and organic farms in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California.
In 1995, Laub moved to Nicaragua where she worked on community gardens, reforestation and environmental education as a Peace Corps volunteer. While there, she learned to speak Spanish, pay attention to world politics and how to make tortillas.
Laub then returned to Milwaukee to join the ranks of the non-profit sector. Currently, she works at the United Performing Arts Fund (UPAF) and keeps busy by painting, throwing pots, reading, trying to understand her two-year old son, seeing performances and howling at the moon.
