In Kait Kerrigan’s play “Father/Daughter,” the father and daughter are never in the same place at the same time, and they also play the parts of each other’s lovers.
Making its world premiere at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company, the two-actor play shifts back and forth between two different couples from the very beginnings of their relationships: a 30-year-old recently divorced father starting a new relationship and his 30-year-old daughter beginning a new romance 23 years later.
It’s Aurora’s return to live in-person theater after a number of online productions during the pandemic shutdown. Aurora will also offer streaming performances of “Father/Daughter” during the last week of the run, Dec. 7-12.
Kerrigan initially wrote “Father/Daughter” over the space of a week at the Lark, a play development lab in New York City that closed down this October. She’d written a number of plays and musicals before, most of the latter with composer Bree Lowdermilk, but “Father/Daughter” was her first two-person play. She went on to develop the play in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s 2019 New Works Festival.
“I was writing from a very personal place,” Kerrigan says. “The play itself is not autobiographical at this stage at all. But in the initial draft, it was a little bit of my own private therapy session. I was writing about the experience of getting married to my husband and writing about the experience of discovering the ways in which the choice that you make in the partner that you choose shifts the relationships with your parents, and allows sometimes for you to grow in that relationship with your parents.”
Her husband, Nathan Tysen, is also a lyricist for musicals, including “Amélie,” which premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2015. and “Paradise Square.”
“My mother had me when she was 20, and I’d always played this game with myself like, ‘Oh my gosh, I would have a 10-year-old right now!’” says Kerrigan. “But I’d never really played it with my father. And I suddenly realized when I was getting married, oh my God, my dad met his wife when he was 30, which is when I met my husband.”
In Aurora’s world premiere, Oakland Theater Project co-artistic director William Thomas Hodgson plays father Baldwin and his daughter’s boyfriend, Louis. Sam Jackson, a frequent performer at Aurora and Shotgun Players, plays daughter Miranda and Risa, her father’s girlfriend.
“I really love the form of this play,” says Hodgson. “Two actors playing four different characters and not having really any scenic changes and really limiting costume changes. We’ve tried to put a lot of specificity in the show around physicality and vocal changes. And skipping 23 years ahead between these two 30-year-olds at two different periods in the nineties and 2000s, there’s different social weights. There’s different people that they’re allowed to be.”
“And because we are two Black actors playing these roles, now all of a sudden these characters have become Black when they weren’t initially Black,” notes Jackson. “Definitely in Black culture, the difference between how someone in their 30s carries themselves in 1992 and in 2001 are very different. There’s a statuesqueness about the way women were carrying themselves in the nineties that we don’t feel as though we need to anymore. And Baldwin is now a Black man in the nineties who doesn’t live with his daughter. It’s a very different story than a white man in the nineties not living with his daughter. There’s a lot more judgment that comes with that.”
Generational differences loomed large for Kerrigan when she was writing the play.
“One of the things I found myself really thinking about was the way that my parents and really their entire generation had moved into adulthood so much more quickly than my generation has,” she says. “I just had my second child at 40 because I spent the first half of my adult life trying to get a foothold in a playwriting and musical theater landscape. But even my friends who have more normal jobs, they were in their 30s when they had their kids or thought about trying to settle down or get married. And everyone in my mom and dad’s generation, that just wasn’t the case.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘FATHER/DAUGHTER’
By Kait Kerrigan, presented by Aurora Theatre Company
Through: Dec. 12, (also streaming online Dec. 7-12)
Where: Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $20-$78; 510-843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org
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