MOM’S THE WORD
Humour from the home front
Deborah Williams said she had a thriving theatre career before she started a family. But after she had a baby, her agent let her go.
“It killed me,” she said. “It was devastating to think that that was it, and you’ve made this permanent choice.”
Williams and her friends are the driving force behind Mom’s the Word, a project they started nearly 25 years ago after they all experienced similar struggles as mothers trying to work in the theatre. It has since become a series of shows, with the most recent — Mom’s the Word: Nest 1/2 Empty — coming to Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon.
Williams said the first show was about the early experiences she and her friends had as mothers, with each of them taking a different focus.
When their children began reaching their teenage years, she said, there were more stories to tell — and now as their children are moving out (and in some cases, back in) there are more experiences to share with audiences that understand the circumstances and difficulties of having a family.
“People just want to know that they’re not alone ... that they’re not the only ones screwing up relationships, or struggling with having their kids back home, or getting angry at their spouses,” Williams said.
“Everybody is going through the same stuff.”
The show is billed as a comedy, but Williams said there are plenty of poignant moments to go along with the humour. And it’s not hard to imagine some real emotion from some of the topics that Williams threw out, whether it be a wife dealing with their husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, or working through a divorce with the family.
All of these stories, from the funny and lighthearted to the serious and thoughtful, come from the personal lives and experiences of the women who have written them and will perform them.
Williams said it can make for a difficult performance to address some of their personal lives onstage, but she also said they try to make it as real and human as possible.
“We each write our own stories,” she said. “But they are from our own lives. And as hard as it is to do the first few times, you get used to telling the stories.”
Mom’s the Word: Nest 1/2 Empty is the third in their series of shows, and they’ve gained a lot of attention for their company and their stories. Williams said it’s been performed in 14 languages and 19 countries since they wrote the first show in 1994, and she credits their success to telling stories that all people can connect to.
As Williams puts it, parenting is “kind of the same all over.” And that’s why this series has resonated for so long.
“What’s so fun is just to be there and enjoy it with the audience,” she said. “There’s a sense that they could be up there telling their stories, and it would be exactly the same.”