What is Love you Love you Love you and how did it come to be?
Love you Love you Love you is an original play I created over the past 1.5 years and presented at the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe and Cannonball festivals. The play is inspired by my mother’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease and our shifting relationship over the last 10 years.
As a daughter and theatre artist, I felt compelled to grapple with the ongoing loss of my mom, who has been a central figure for most of my life. While she’s been fading and losing parts of her identity to Alzheimer’s, I’ve also been raising my young son and watching him come into himself. I felt there was something there that needed to be made into a play.
The act of creating Love you Love you Love you was a way to mourn my mother and walk through this “long goodbye,” while confronting the likelihood that someday my son will be watching me succumb to this illness. But ultimately as a theatre artist, I also knew I needed to create a poetic space where audiences could be with their own family experiences of this illness.
Director Alex Tatarsky and I worked over several development phases. I brought poems, articles, family photos, mementos, and recipes to rehearsal. I improvised on my feet, free-wrote, choreographed movement sequences, created a Baba Yaga character (my mother had a fondness for the Russian witch), and embodied dementia as a vapor that drifts in and devours.
In our final phase, I hired 4 designers who brought the play’s themes to life through sound, light, objects, and costumes. I ran a crowdfunding campaign, which enabled me to pay my collaborators along with generous gifts from key donors/producers and the Free to Be Fund of The Philadelphia Foundation.
Who initially inspired you to grapple with dementia?
My mom’s mother had dementia for about 11 years. So when my mom started exhibiting signs of cognitive decline in her early 70s, my sister and I were understandably concerned.
My mom lives alone and in a different state from my sister and me, which has made visits hard. And in our efforts to help, we would often run up against my mom’s stubbornness, denial, and growing inability to take care of herself. Other comorbidities entered the picture.
Parenting the parent was a difficult transition for all of us and involved a lot of failure. The shame, resentment, and guilt I felt, became impossible to sustain. So as a theatre artist, I began to search for a way to alchemize these feelings—which felt so destructive—into something creative that could incorporate a more complex and flawed love.
My core aim in making this piece was: To move closer to my mom’s dementia.
How has working on dementia-related art changed you?
Working with dementia has changed my artistic outlook on perfection. I knew I wanted to embrace the style of clown (theatrical clown, not circus clown), where there is an immediate relationship with the audience. The clown acknowledges and plays with everything that happens in the present moment, so the audience necessarily becomes a part of the performance. This notion of presence with others was also something I’ve been curious about vis-a-vis dementia. By welcoming accidents and imperfections into my shows, I think it allowed more space for vulnerability and joy.
This process has also changed me. When I had my son 9 years ago, I went from being an actor and part-time instructor to full-time professor. When I came up for a sabbatical, I decided to create an original show and I felt strongly it had to be inspired by something I was living with each day. Putting this personal material to creative use was grounding for me and even—because it asked me to reach beyond own experience—healing.
How has Love you Love you Love you been received?
Love you Love you Love you had a very successful 5-show run in September at Philly Fringe and Cannonball festivals. My run was nearly sold out, and I continue to hear positive feedback from folks who saw it. Plays Unpleasant and thINKing Dance have covered the performance.
Audience members whom I spoke to afterward mentioned how the show resonated with their experiences with family dementia and the complex dynamics of caregiving for a loved one. They appreciated how Love you Love you Love you was both sad and funny—a balance I was keen to strike. I was honored to learn that the show allowed folks to sit with the myriad of emotions that accompany loss, yet emerge with gratitude for this communal, poetic encounter with a difficult theme.
Connecting with ARTZ Philadelphia and having the group represented at some of my shows was a hopeful reminder that community awareness for dementia is growing in the Philadelphia area. ARTZ performs an essential service to persons living with dementia and their care partners by engaging them in imaginative, joyful conversations around art and music. I’ve enjoyed volunteering with them and I hope Love you Love you Love you has helped spread awareness of what they do.
Dedicated to: All the love and effort I’ve put into this piece has been dedicated to my mother Deborah and to my son Jesse.
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