Boys in the Basement is a story about men broken by the pain of divorce trying to rebuild their lives (and doing that badly in some cases). So why is the play set in a basement.
When I was writing the play last winter I drew on my own experiences of divorce in 1993. At the time I lived in a tiny apartment which had a little dingy laundry room with one washer and one dryer for all the tenants of the building. Also down there were some beat-up chairs. I would often sit down there, assuming I might get mugged at any minute (the New Yorker in me) wishing I had some people to talk to about what I was going through.
A divorced man in the suburbs, which after all are all about family. A divorced father who tries to stay in his children’s lives is seen as an oddity at best, a threat to the married social order at worst. Friends from when you were married pick sides and suddenly disappear from your life.
I would eventually meet other divorced men and we would create new friendships. I often wished we could all sit around together in the evenings and talk about our struggles, but we lived in widely spread out locations.
Boys in the Basement brings a group of divorced men together to have those talks I only imagined so many years ago.
Performances of Boys in the Basement will take place at the Noyes Cultural Arts Building (adjacent to the Noyes purple Line stop in Evanston) Friday and Saturday, Nov. 6,7, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 8, at 3 p.m. Performances also will take place the same times the following weekend, Nov. 13-15. For ticket information, go to Brown Paper Tickets.
Special ticket prices are available for Friday evening shows for those who have been through or are going through the pain of divorce a well as for adult children of divorced parents. Click here for details.
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