Just Pretend Everything Is Perfectly Normal

Just Pretend Everything is Perfectly Normal is a collection of four short, edgy new solo and ensemble works by writer/performers Janna L. Goodwin and Diana Buirski. The evening playfully explores the dangerous intersections of suburbia and family; fear and rage; constraining social norms and liberating creativity.

Up To Your Elbow, Buirski’s award-winning one-person show, looks at the comically dark side of a close, yet long-distance mother-daughter relationship in which love is expressed as anxiety and curiosity as suspicion. If You Lived Here, You’d be Home by Now features a divorced, lesbian mother (Goodwin) whose 12-year old daughter is missing. She reconstructs the events leading up to her daughter’s disappearance, posing wracking questions about her own decisions, priorities and mistakes. Pointers, also by Goodwin, is a portrait of a narcissistic, unpredictable woman with scissors: Lily, the owner of a beauty shop in a Midwestern strip mall, cuts the hair of a young, pregnant woman while advising her about relationships and raising children. Mother’s Day is an impressionistic fugue within a realistic frame. It explores the expectations that impress upon women to choose among limited roles available to them. In it, a mother wakes to the horror of realizing that she may have inadvertently murdered the most vital, imaginative aspects of herself.