Miriam Kook – Playwright/Music/Lyrics

The concept for this play has been brewing in my mind and heart for many years. The sudden death of my loving, musical father when I was seven years old was the turning point of my life and is indelibly engraved in my memory banks. My mother, who had been a stay-at-home mom to three children had to find work and moved us from a cute little ranch home in New Jersey to a tiny apartment in NYC. There was no talking about him, very few pictures of him, and it soon felt like he had never existed. Except, I kept a diary in which I wrote to a person named Chris. I wrote to Chris every night and poured out all of my very private thoughts to him/her. I hoped there was really someone out there listening. A part of me wondered if my dad was out there, if he could still see me, if he still loved me, if he had God’s ear about me. I think Chris was my dad.

There have been special moments in my life when I have felt connected to the “great beyond out there,” the world to which my dad may have gone. It happened in my bed alone in the months after my dad died when I would recite Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd…) and then ask God to send my dad back. He didn’t answer that prayer but it still felt like a holy moment. It happened at summer camp when at Friday night services we were encouraged to have a moment of silent prayer. I would take the opportunity to talk to someone called God who supposedly cared about me. It happened once when I was on an LSD trip during college. I was in the beautiful fields behind my dorm standing at the top of some bleachers holding my arms out and calling to my dad. This incessant hunger for my dad has always been with me. Ask any adult who lost a parent in their childhood or even in their adult years. Ask anyone who has ever lost anyone they loved. This burning desire to get behind that thick, eternal curtain and be reunited with that person never leaves.

So, this story, with many twists and turns, has been with me all of these years. I have told it in a memoir I wrote for my kids and grandkids called, “The Long Way Home: Father Lost, Father Found.” But I knew there had to be music attached to this story because music is the main language of my soul. How was I to do it?

A few years ago, I was invited by playwright Steffi Rubin to write the music for her musical called, “My Other Mother” and I enjoyed the process a great deal. The play was about her childhood as an adoptee who wanted to find her birth family and discovered the surprising reality of “her other mother.” We started working together in 2016 and put on one staged reading in June 2018, got feedback, did a lot of re-writes, and reproduced it as another staged reading in March 2019. I had the bug and decided it was time for me to write my story into a musical.

I spent the rest of 2019 writing down ideas, song titles, outlines, and melodies. Covid hit in the spring of 2020 and all my other activities ground down to a complete halt. By that time, I had completed the script and songs for Act I. I started researching Facebook groups for aspiring playwrights and found an organization called “TheaterMakers.” They hosted a 30- day play challenge which I joined with the intention of writing Act II and its songs. I also had the opportunity to share all of Act I with everyone in the class and got amazing feedback and, more importantly, supportive direction. After that, I had some professional vetting done and sought out editing help from writer friends all of which enabled me to turn the play inside out and upside down. It was a very difficult process, but the real core of the play started to emerge.

TheaterMakers encouraged me to take the next step and put my play up on its feet. In the spring of 2021, I invited Debbie Mobley, who is an incredible director, actor, yoga teacher, and a beautiful human being in the DMV, to direct a Zoom reading of my play. We put together a stellar cast and the actors, with little lead time, performed beautifully and provided more feedback which spurred me on to the next level. 

Shots of the Zoom cast:

I knew I needed to cut more fat off the bone of the play and somehow managed to reduce the number of pages from 165 to 106. Painful, very painful, but necessary. Audiences having to sit through a 3-hour play would have bitten my head off!

Enter Steven Fleming who had been an early reader and very helpful editor/commenter on the play. Steven has been an accomplished director for Toby’s Dinner Theater in Columbia, Md., for CCTA, (Toby’s teen professional theater), a theatre teacher at Oakland Mills High School (also in Columbia, Md.), and currently an assistant principal there. We spent time talking about character arcs, plotlines, structure, and he began to cast a vision for the staging of the show. He saw things I hadn’t seen before. I very timidly asked him if he would consider directing the next production and he agreed. I was thrilled. And so here we are!