by Claire Chafe
Directed by Mary Beth Easley
October 19-29, 2006
Why We Have a Body won many awards including the San Francisco Dramalogue Award, the Bay Area Critic's Circle Award for original script, and Newsday's George Oppenheimer Award, presented annually for the most impressive debut of an American playwright. It was included in Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 1993.
"Two young women, Lili and her emotionally troubled sister, Mary, ache for the return of their lost mother, Eleanor, who left home years ago to "get lost." In a collage of scenes the two sisters and their mother, and Lili's new lover, Renee, speak alternately to us and to each other as they try to live with absence, with great distance. Mary neatly solves the problem of distance by sending telepathic letters to her mother, alas not a possible solution for her sane sister. The vast spaces that separate us from our past, from the ones we love, and from knowing ourselves constitute the landscape of Why We Have a Body."
-from Liz Diamond's introduction to Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 1993
