Nancy O'Neal

The whole series is wonderful, and this is a good part of it.

I loved this play. I'm streaming it over again on PBS. It is raw. The emotions take me with them. I'm memorizing lines, especially of the mother and the daughter, that I relate to strongly. I was an "Invisible girl" in my family, too. Had to become invisible in order to survive. But wanted to die because my life as a child and adolescent was just pain and fear. I've had years of therapy, and I am much better now, in my eighties. How wonderful it might have been to have gotten rid of the depression when I still had decades of life yet to be lived. Instead I look back on what might have been, and am happy I don't still have to drag that impossible weight of depression around with me for another decade. Sometimes I wish my parents were still alive so I could tell them how they hurt my brother and me. How they crushed us. Broke us. But in the 'forties and 'fifties, in the southern mid-west, lots of people hurt their kids and thought nothing of it, and the society at large thought nothing of it. So my parents got to take leave of their lives long before I was well enough to have explained things to them. And now I am so grateful that the topic of mental illness is finally presented in this musical that is so easy to relate to. My pain did not come from the same sources as in the play, but the subject of depression is presented well by the words and music. Genius.