Dramaturg’s Note

April Sizemore-Barber

Who Cares: The Caregiver Interview Project had its genesis as a conversation between artistic collaborators A. Lorraine Robinson and Ari Roth, in 2021 where each admitted struggling to balance their professional and personal lives with the sudden responsibility of caring for an ailing family member. This initial conversation begat others amongst their circle of friends [and beyond], which they eventually captured (starting in March 2022), as a series of interviews with over 20 # people. Through these exchanges, stories began to emerge and echo one another, their unique details providing texture to a larger thematic canvas. (The play was further developed through three 29 hour workshops & readings along with Project Doula, Vanessa Gilbert, and an ensemble of professional actors in October 2023 and April 2024, plus with Director Kate Bryer in November 2024.)  In this macro lens, it became clear that the individual daily challenges of caring for loved ones—experiences of frustration, isolation, and economic distress—were, in fact, symptoms of a much larger, collective problem. “Millions of people feel like they’re failing at aging, or failing at caring,” as eldercare advocate Theresa puts it at one point in the play, “when in fact it’s society that’s failing them.”

As the past has oft proved in prologue form, a society that refuses to care for its most vulnerableis deeply unhealthy. Tales of mortality, care, and loss have long provided material for great literature and art. Yet the specific narratives gathered in Who Cares cut close to bone in ouremergent “post”-Covid era, where bodies seem ever-more fragile and community ever-more tenuous. As we are increasingly herded into social media silos, our stories monetized into Content, it is worth asking: What does it mean to really listen when everybody seems to be speaking over each other? What does it mean to find community and bear witness to each other’s stories?

As a live, shared space, theatre remains a vital arena to take on these and other pressing questions. Who Cares draws heavily on the tradition of verbatim theatre, an urgent and responsive medium that takes interviews as its dramatic text and re-presents spoken testimony word-for-word. In verbatim performance, the extra-linguistic aspects of everyday speech such as pauses, unfinished thoughts and stutters, remain in situ as revealing moments of insight and character rather than verbal static to be polished or removed entirely. In this spirit, though its support-group setting is fictional, the words of the play’s caretakers remain largely unedited and unadorned from their original interview form. As Anna Deavere Smith, perhaps the foremost practitioner of this artform notes: “Speaking teaches us what our natural ‘literature’ is. In fact,everyone, in a given amount of time, will say something that is like poetry.” 

One of the most meaningful and surprising discoveries of the Who Cares creation process, from the initial interview through post-show discussions, has been the eagerness with which people have wanted to share their own stories of caretaking. Tales of anger and exhaustion, yes; but equally profound, stories of humor and grace, all underscored by the deep love between those who care and those who are cared for. In fact, there is an apt linguistic symmetry in how we refer to those who perform care work as equally as “caretakers” and “caregivers.” This reciprocity, the blurring of giver and receiver, gestures to the mutuality of care—even as it reflects the poignant reality that for many, especially those with elderly parents, these roles will invariably be reversed.

We welcome you, the audience, into the circle to witness to this process of call and response. After the performance, we invite you to stay for discussion and share your stories as we co-create a Third Act together, collectively imagining better, more caring ways of being with each other.

Reflections from the Co-Writers

Ari Roth, Founding Artistic Producing Partner, VFP

It’s been a season to explore the contours of care in our community, with more than a few DC theaters, museums, and book events gathering authors, artists, and audience to chronicle the landscape of caregiving. It’s one of our healthier post-pandemic developments: recognizing the importance of care. We all need it, and we’re all, increasingly, being summoned to give it.

Because Lorraine and I have been intimately involved in different caregiving intensities, we have found ourselves drawn to difficult, knotty stories that resonate with our experience; that have made us feel not only less alone, but fully engaged by the love and fragility emanating from the interviews we conducted, in counterpoint to the brutal nature of deterioration. The grist contained in these stories is the stuff of life; real pain, real tenderness, shared in vivid detail, revealing abundant richness. 

These stories come from our midst – from within our theater community, and beyond. We are compelled to care for loved ones as an expression of love, but also out of a sense of responsibility. Yet the reality of caregiving’s demands leads to conflict, both internal – as some of us battle feelings of guilt or resentment – and external, as we fight uncaring bureaucracies, dismissive social networks, and the natural despair from being close to disease.  These are the hard facts of caregiving. We are pulled. We are overwhelmed. We are hurt. We grieve. 

This project is both documentary based – venerating veracity of expression – and artful, imagining the dynamics of a support group where there was no group. We’ve created a new theatrical reality, and it’s been a joy to shape that group’s evolution. To what end?  To honor what might have otherwise remained an isolating experience. To be demonstrative where we might have stayed quiet.  Something elemental is at play here. Our need to tell the most elemental aspects of life – private stories; family hardship; the stuff of drama – shared in a circle.

A.  Lorraine Robinson, Artistic Producing Partner, VFP

Working on Who Cares: the caregiver interview project has been an experience of crafting and sharing some of the most personal material that I have ever been involved in within the theatre. Elements of the main character, Lorri, are based on my personal story and experiences as a caregiver.  I wanted to engage in this project because, unexpectedly becoming a caregiver is one of the most dramatic situations I have ever experienced in my life to date.   It has taken me thru daily highs and lows, from great worry to frequent moments of absurd humor, and has pushed me outside of my normal limits to the extremities of my capabilities emotionally, physically, and so much more.  My life turned upside down due to the triple experience of the pandemic, a job transition, and the need for caregiving happening concurrently.  And, yet, I have to say it also has been the most awe-inspiring time, when I was able to be of help to someone in my family and I was able to both give and receive a great deal of love and care.  It has made me profoundly grateful for all of the circles of people (past and present) around me and how I am a part of these essential networks.  Thank you to our interviewees, my fellow Co-Writers, Ari and Vanessa, as well as our wonderful cast, director, movement consultant, and creative production team for taking on this creative journey together alongside me.

Vanessa Gilbert, Creative Project Doula 

When Ari and Lorraine approached me as an interview subject for Who Cares in summer 2023, I was only a few months into my caregiving era, desperate for the opportunity to reflect upon what was happening to my mother, to me.  A few months later, invited into the workshop process as a Creative Project Doula charged to shepherd shaping the interview material into something to perform,  I noted that each of the interviewees expressed a gratitude for the compassionate listening running through the enterprise. So few of us had outlets to tell our caregiving stories and to be directly asked to share felt miraculous- finally a place to process the maddening, gratifying, tragic, affirming work we were all doing.   My task then became to turn my ears to the interviewers, to listen compassionately to Ari and Lorraine, and to mirror back to them their hopes and dreams for what the piece could do, coming from such a plurality of experiences.  From that, I was asked to join as a writer and a group writing process organically grew, sometimes clumsy and always heartfelt, as we attempted to be accountable to the original material and to reflect the incredible range of personal caregiving experiences that somehow alchemically unite us. I’ve been absent during the rehearsal process due to caregiving, so will be seeing the production alongside our first audiences. I’m looking forward to learning how to listen to the piece, and our interviewees, again. I hope that you, as the most recent compassionate listener, find much to sustain you as you move through whatever caring experiences you find yourself navigating…