You heard it on Cribsheet first: It’s the next Vagina Monologues, taking shape right here in our fair city.

The rain come down in sheets but that didn’t stop the first performance of The Mother Project from packing the small theater in a red brick building in south Minneapolis. As latecomers (like moi) shook umbrellas and settled into hastily-added benches and chairs, the six Twin Cities mothers who’d stolen precious hours away from family to hone their stories over several months lined up on stage - younger and older, of different shapes and colors.

We laughed, we gasped, we came close to tears. On stage, out loud, were the contradictions, joys and frustrations of motherhood snatched from snippets of everyday life. There was none of the tedious angst over work and/or family, or husband-and-wife tussles over child care. No, the show was much more subtle than that. In picking the smallest moments, they maybe succeeded in making the biggest points.

From the frazzled mother whose kid falls in a park, weighing whether to take the child in to the doctor versus going to the manicure she’d been looking forward to all week…to the mom in her mini-van dropping her kids off at sports practice, turning on old Bjork CDs in an attempt to recapture her old cool self….to the hilarious segment simply titled “I Bit My Kid,” the pieces showed how motherhood doesn’t just open a whole new world, it takes away the old.

It’s that loss of freedom that you often glimpse, fleetingly, on the face of that mother sitting on a park bench, gazing right through the playing children, or the woman with dark circles under her eyes handing out snacks at the zoo. 

It’s been a month since the show but I guess I wasn’t the only one who was won over.

Darcy Engen, who teaches theater at Augsburg College and who directed the Mother Project, just told Cribsheet that Open Eye Theater has asked them back for a series of shows the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Cribsheeters, mark November 15, 16 and 17 on your calendars and check with Open Eye closer to the dates for times and ticket info. Then when the show hits Broadway, you can say you saw it first. In south Minneapolis. Â

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