Play a Day: I Go Somewhere Else

Inda Craig-Galván

For Wednesday I read I Go Somewhere Else, by Inda Craig-Galván, and available at New Play Exchange.

As a man in a play once said, "This play is memory." This play includes several nods and allusions to past classic plays and movies about American families and their intimate intricacies, like tiny knots that must be unpicked to be understood. These references serve to place this unique, specific tale in its rightful place as part of that larger tapestry.

I Go Somewhere Else is told from the point of one women at three stages of her life, yearning to understand her mother, for it is she, the mother, who is truly at the center of this tale. Reda, the mother, is possessive, abusive, and controlling of her daughter (first Lanny, then Langree and finally Tabitha.)

On one day, the younger self asks -- though there is an implicit request or plea involved -- "Aren't we supposed to love everybody? No matter what they've done to hurt us in the past?" For when someone we love hurts us, we assume it is something we have done to deserve it, even a blameless child thinks this.

The playwright creates a mother who is at turns proud and irrational and mean-spirited and sad, yet deftly lays out the story of Reda's life and relationships which leaves it squarely at our feet to understand her and to forgive her, as we strive to understand and forgive our own mothers. The way we hope our children may one day understand and forgive us.