orphan song

theatre without theatre

My father passed away due to cardiac arrest this past weekend after five months of debilitating, life-altering, extended complications from the effects of having suffered aspiration pneumonia. He was ninety-three years old. A long, rich, full, complicated life. My mother passed away in September of 2024 after a long illness and the terrible effects of a very bad fall. She was ninety-one years old. Another very rich, complex life. I am an only child. We were a tight-knit trio. Both of my anchors are gone. In relatively short succession. I am unmoored and bereft. And don’t know who I am anymore or who I will be.

Photo by Brad Allred on Unsplash

My mom and dad were my biggest champions. Even when they didn’t understand my work at all, they would say how proud they were of my achievements and they would always tell me to keep believing in myself against all odds. I wrote, in part, for them. Sometimes for their approval, but more often than not, thinking of them as my audience. I wanted to make them proud and not do things half-assed. Both of them instilled in me a very strong work ethic, and I knew that if I sort of made a theatre piece, they would call me out immediately. Sort of? Never! You always need to give 100 percent!

While I thought of and still think of them (because they live in my heart now as well as in the stars) as my audience and soul’s focus, not all the plays and texts I have made have been expressly for them in mind. Only a few have been genuinely written for them specifically. GUAPA (winner of 2013 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, and recipient of an NNPN Rolling World Premiere) was written as a veiled love letter to my dad’s days as a professional soccer player seen through the eyes and dreams of the central soccer-playing-character of Guapa. LAS CHICAS HOLIDAY (my newest play- unproduced) was written specifically for my mom. It’s exactly the kind of play she would have loved, and was always begging me to write. “So many weird plays, Cari! Write a fun and glamourous play!”

Mom, I finally did. I am sorry it took me so long to figure it out. I hope one day, if it is ever seen before the end of the world, you can watch it from up there in the stars, and smile.

When I think of the labor of my parents, I don’t only think about the jobs they had, but about the unpaid emotional and material work they did for me out of love - staying up nights helping me memorize lines when I wanted to be an actor in undergraduate school, driving me to rehearsals and acting and music lessons at odd hours, mailing scripts and packages for me when I was off “on the road” on a residency trying to eke out a living, calling me to chat about how the day went, what rehearsals were like (when I was in rehearsal), worried and wondering how their daughter was navigating the big world of theatre and academia and freelancing and life all on her own without a net. Except they were my net. And I was theirs too. In more ways than one.

Both parents not born in the USA. My dad is from Argentina. My mom is from Cuba. Long story about how they met and fell in love which I will save for another time, but suffice to say that when they moved to Philadelphia, PA, where I was born (although I was conceived in Bogota, Colombia), neither of them knew much English, and as I grew up, I often served as translator and interpreter for them in situations that were English only until they were both eventually fluent enough to carry on. Both remade their lives from scratch when they came to the USA. Both as adults. In their 30s. No small feat to move to a new country and start your lives over in a new language and with little money. And then with a baby in tow.

My dad used to regale me with stories about taking every odd job he could find to keep food on the table: he worked in a bakery, he worked in a factory that made boxes, he worked as an accountant, he worked in textiles (where he finally, after his soccer days, established a career for himself). He would work the night shift when we lived in Paterson, New Jersey, and come back to the apartment at the crack of dawn in all weather. My mom, who used to be an educator in Havana, Cuba (she had her own school that she founded!) worked retail jobs here, there and everywhere, did paid sewing alterations, tutored children, and tried to hold the rented apartment together with love and devotion and ingenuity, always reading the interior design and fashion magazines to look for ideas to brighten up the house.

We all dreamt of owning a house and would spend Sunday afternoons sometimes driving to the rich part of whatever town or city we were living in at the time to look at the fancy houses where the well-to-do or upper-middle-class lived. We would compare the houses and wonder about what it was like to live in a house and not in an apartment, and what having a front and back yard meant.

But we always rented.

Somehow there was always this fear that if we settled down and bought something we would have to stay put. My dad especially had a fear of staying in one place too long. Maybe a remnant of his soccer days, when he played for teams in Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Canada, and the US (yes, he played here too back in the day before soccer was a thing. he played for the Ukrainian Nationals and won an Eastern Conference League championship or two before he hung up his cleats). My mom longed to settle down and I, ever filled with wanderlust, actually also longed for it too.

I still do.

I still dream, even now, in what feels like the end of our lives, of a place of my/our own.

I say the end, because although this anchor-less place of being orphaned could be seen as a beginning (and maybe it is), the weight of health stuff of my own and the chaotic world into which the ruling class has and continue to force us edges me toward endings and how things end and what we don’t allow ourself to feel when endings are upon us, and grief is asking us to face each other as we try to come through.

I used to sing the Gillian Welch song “Orphan Girl” (1996) all the time. It was my unofficial go-to song ever since I first heard Welch sing it and then Emmylou Harris. I have written many plays and a feature film (FUGITIVE DREAMS) with it in mind.

I adopted it as “my” song because it always felt true.

Now I am living it.

And I am wondering if I ever knew it at all.