"My God, Mother died!"	"Mom's got to stay here."	"How's Mother? Impossible!"
"Amazing, how people change"	"Okay!"	"There. I'm out of my housecoat."
"This is your best? I'd hate to see your worst!"	"Dinner, is dinner."	"We've got to find that fire..."

Concept Statement, Social Security   March 8, 1999
Introduction
This particular production was an interesting occurrence in my work.  I was not originally scheduled to direct this show, but the director whom was assigned, due to unpredictable circumstances was unable to do it.  Literally three days before auditions were to take place the Artistic Director of Ferndale Repertory Theatre came to me.  I read through the script that night and though I immediately recognized how this script looked deceptively simple on the surface and was in fact a very tricky piece to make work correctly, it did have only 6 characters, a single set, a fairly contemporary time period and would be fairly simple to at least produce.  I accepted the position.

Concept & Goals
Conceptually, I saw this play as a delightful light comedy meant to entertain and reflect some very familial relationship traits that many of us endure.  At the same time, this is a play with a lot of heart. One of the traps with lighter comedies that I see many actors and directors fall into is in not investing enough into the characters.  Yes, comedy of this sort often relies on stereotypes, but at the same time, the connection you want from the audience comes from distinct living and breathing characters.  Within their crazy world, their goals are very important.  The second trap to avoid is in getting overly sentimental with this play: wanting to make the characters too idealistic, their feelings too syrupy.  I attempted instead to lean into more irony and play against some of that sentiment.

Challenges and Approach
As I said before, this is a very tricky script in that it involves an enormous amount of sit-down talking and storytelling.  I had to find action within the scenes and capitalize on it.  I utilized the scenes with inherent action and played it as full as possible.  The challenge of the sit-down scenes then became how to make the telling of the stories and the reaction to those stories more active.  Developing specific character behaviors and standard means of interaction (such as Barbara’s repeated hit of David when he said something rude) added not only valuable action, but also punctuation to key comedic moments as well as a sense of context and history to the character’s relationships.

Outcome
All in all I was very pleased with the outcome of this production.  I consider it among some of my best work especially considering I had no previous knowledge of this play and that I had virtually no preparation time.  Luckily the design team and I had worked together previously and saw eye to eye on nearly all issues.  I felt that the creativity of my cast, designers and my work blended seamlessly.  The audiences seemed to greatly enjoy it, the reviews were all very positive and sales exceeded all expectations.  The process was truly a joy for me and for the cast.  We’ve even discussed the possibility of a reunion production to bring this group together again in the future.