How could I possibly imagine that when I sat down to my computer in 1991 to express my fears and dreams about adopting a child, that one day those words would be acted out at the Alice Griffin Jewel Theater on 42nd Street in New York City?
On July 31, I sat with the birthmother of my adopted daughter as we watched “My Real Mother” by playwright Riley Thomas, an adaptation of our book, OPEN-An Adoption Story in Three Voices. It was surreal to make the trek to New York almost thirty years after writing those first words in a journal, never thinking anyone would ever read them… much less see them played out on stage for all to see.
The book began as a journal and a collection of correspondence between my daughter’s birthmother and me, as we began to navigate what was emerging in our country: OPEN adoption. Up to that point, closed adoptions were the order of the day and often, young women gave their child up for adoption without ever knowing what became of the child she could not raise. Family secrets flourished and, in the aftermath, life-long searches began for the “real” mother. I did not want that for my child.
After a rocky start to our relationship, the birthmother and I decided that we should compile our letters and give them to our daughter when she grew up. When we finished the first draft in 1999, we stared down at a sugar-coated version of what it was really like. We then made a life-changing decision—to rewrite the story, adding our true feelings behind the sanguine story we had planned to share with our mutual child. In fact, what began as a love story between me and my then-husband morphed into the real love story between the birthmother and me, as we attempted to overcome our fears and give the best of ourselves to our daughter.
We published “OPEN” in 2015 and sold about 580 copies with great reviews. It was raw. It rang true. We felt exposed. Then something very unlikely happened. Riley Thomas, a talented young playwright, was taking his movie “Stuck” to the Breckenridge Film Festival and stopped into the barbershop of my daughter’s birthmother, who shared that she had written a book about open adoption. Thomas, an adopted child himself, promised to read the book on his way back to Manhattan. A few weeks later, we got a call. He loved it. He wanted to make a musical about it. How do you write music about the rocky evolution of two very flawed women and their struggles which were informed by their personal histories? The birthmother, Tina Zimmerman, felt it was fate. My daughter feared it was a scam. I felt that, perhaps, as with all the unlikely coincidences in our story, anything was possible, however unlikely.
Sure enough, Thomas did write a musical, a poignant look into the lives of the two women who had to overcome the demons of their past to learn the power of love. After its workshop debut at Carthage College, Wisconsin, in January 2019, it was selected to be showcased at the 2019 New York Musical Festival! The three main characters made their way to New York and sat watching our lives play out to the tears of the audience and standing ovations at every showing. In fact, the actress that played me, Elena Shaddow, won best actress for the entire festival. Katie La Mark, who played Tina Zimmerman, came in 2nd place. The actors told me that they felt so touched by the story. One actor told me, “The cast felt that they had to strip naked and go out on stage and rip their souls out.”
The book sales have skyrocketed. Thomas is now seeking producers to take the play to Broadway! I would say that is almost impossible, but when you go from Jacksonville to off-Broadway in two years, you start to believe that anything is possible.
Marlene Wagener, aka Alaina O’Connell, lives in Jacksonville and teaches Writing a Legacy, through It Just Takes 1, a local nonprofit. Her book, “OPEN- An Adoption Story in Three Voices,” can be purchased through Amazon or at Barnes & Noble.