Mom’s The Word
By Jill Daum & Alison Kelly & Robin Nichol & Barbara Pollard & Deborah Williams
& LINDA A. CARSON
A hysterically funny and deeply touching play, it deals in shocking detail with all the important elements of childrearing; the good, the bad, and the ugly. Humourous, emotional, ecstatic and hysterical, Mom’s the Word is a chorus line of confessional anecdotes and vignettes combined to create the mother of all comedies. Without the rose-coloured lens treatment, Mom’s the Word is a hilarious, intimate look at motherhood.
Touching, vivid tales of giving birth to a premature baby are balanced against comic, ribald stories of diaper soup and sex after children. All six moms have two children, suffer from sleep deprivation, and have some of the most outrageous stories you’ve ever heard – all of them true. It is group therapy like never before.
Mom’s The Word has had a full gestation period going back to conception in the spring of 1993. Six Vancouver women who had once been exciting, glamorous and professional actors were now exhausted, bedraggled amateur mothers with ten children under six between them. They decided to get together to write a show about motherhood. They met regularly on Saturday mornings with their children. They talked, they laughed, they whined, they complained and they laughed some more. Suddenly their first performance was just three weeks away. Although they had nothing on paper, they felt enormously better about their children, their skills as mothers and their lives in general. They had reinvented group therapy. Luckily, in the ancient tradition of oral history, they remembered each other’s stories and Mom’s the Word was born. The show took its first baby steps at the Vancouver festival Women in View. Over a decade later and more than 2,500 performances to over one million people, Mom’s the Word has crossed the international dateline and the equator.