Maternal material

By Casey Gillis

Published: October 22, 2008

The title came first for playwright and stand-up comedian Karen Gray: “Oh Crap I Forgot to Have Kids.”

“It was one that percolated for awhile,” the Pennsylvania resident says about her latest one-woman show, which she’ll bring to Nellysford’s Hamner Theater this weekend (see box for details).

The show poses questions about how motherhood figures into what it means to be a woman and an adult.

“It was an issue that a lot of women deal with. You look and say, ‘Where is this going to fit in?’” she says.  “(And) what if, for some reason or another, that isn’t something you end up doing?”

This is the fourth one-woman show Gray has penned and, like most of her work, it combines elements of fantasy with her own real-life experiences.

“Even if the characters aren’t real, they come from (some aspect of) my life,” she says.

Gray started honing her comedic skills at a young age.

“I always considered myself, probably, (to be) a really tragic figure,” she laughs. “I cried a lot. But no one was interested in my whining, so I had to turn it into jokes.”

She got involved in theater in high school and studied creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

“I really wanted to be in more of a theatrical setting, but I wanted to be doing my own material,” says Gray, a three-time recipient of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship.

“Oh Crap” marks the fourth collaboration for Gray and director Clair Myers, executive director of The Wayne Theatre Project in Waynesboro.

“He’s really been tremendous at finding and defining moments and sharpening things,” Gray says. “There’s no way I’d be able to launch these things without him.”

If you’re going
WHAT: ‘Oh Crap I Forgot to Have Kids’
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday/Saturday
WHERE: Hamner Theatre, in the Rockfish Valley Community Center in Nellysford, 190 Rockfish School Lane
TICKETS: $10. The show contains adult themes and is intended for an adult audience.
INFO: (434) 361-1999 or http://www.hamnertheater.com