My grandmother had “nose problems”.  If you’re not from the south, that sentence may be misleading. Allow me to clarify: my grandmother was nosey as hell, and she knew it. I spent more than a large part of my childhood listening to her and my aunt talk on the phone for hours about folks while peaking out through the curtains keeping tabs on said folks. Now, with most lessons I’ve learned, I learned something important from my grandmother: people have a lot more going on than they show on the surface and if you just keep quiet and watch long enough, you’ll get the REAL story. Through her, I learned that how people behaved with an audience in tow, could very often be very different from how they behaved in private, and I wanted to know why. So I watched. I watched my own family do this very thing and learned, pretty quickly, the why (spoiler alert: generational trauma…amiright?).

The characters in this show are damaged. Somewhere along the way, they’ve been shaped to exist in such a manner that requires them to portray a certain attitude and engage in a certain behavior as means of protection and, hopefully, survival. It is my hope that you, beloved audience member, will develop nose problems this evening. You find yourself immersed in a party full of folks that have a whole story underneath what they will give you on the surface so I encourage you to look around, underneath, and through the flash and distraction and see what’s really going on. 

There’s skill in being able to distract someone from the truth, but there’s magic in being able to circumvent that distraction and get to the core (soul?) of someone. I want you to leave here knowing exactly who Queenie really is and why she does what she does. Why, really, did Kate run away from home at ten years old? And Madeline? Oof. 

Those answers are there, but you’ll have to find them in the private moments played out around you. These characters would sooner cut out their own (or someone else’s) tongues than let you get anywhere near their truth, so it’s up to you to peek through the curtains and watch when they think no one is watching.

Welcome to the party, y’all. Let's look into some souls. 

Julianna E. Wright