Lush
3F, 4M
Lush follows Mia non-linearly from teenager to mid-life as she navigates her self-destructive urges and fate flings her and those around her in directions they’d never imagined. The play travels from places like a high school reunion in New Jersey in 2002, to a Honky-tonk in Tennessee in 1982, to a television studio on the East Coast in 2026.
How do we end up where we do and how do we move forward in our lives when we carry the pain of the past?
Lush moves forward and backward in time opening with Mia’s life out of control. It's right after September 11th, she's being evicted, and she spills her cocaine all over the restroom floor at her 10-year high school reunion. An out-of-work soap actress, she's moonlighting as a fake psychic who pretends to see across time, even as she struggles to understand her current circumstance. In the past she was traumatized by the death of her friends in a drunken car crash. In the future she’ll marry Johnny who’d traveled to Vegas to sell a guitar for $15,000 to Bobby, who Johnny discovers is his father, who was gifted the guitar by Elvis, and stolen by Bobby’s wife Loretta when she leaves him in Nashville. Like a DNA helix, their lives entwine.