The Play p. 2
The Playwright p. 3
The History p. 4
Setting the Stage: p. 4
Youth in Crisis
Effects of Addiction p. 7
The History of p. 8 Cremation in the U.S.
By Carter W. LewisDirector
Bruce Linser
Season Sponsors
Stephen Brown and Jamie Stern
Producer
Tina and Jeff Bolton
Dramawise Sponsors
Sandra and Bernie Meyer
Dramaguide written by Gary Cadwallader
Iris – a night watchperson for the Belladonna Funeral home. 18 Baker – a fugitive looking for the remains of his recently deceased fiancée. 21 Sally – a security guard. 37
The basement crematorium at Belladonna Funeral Home in Omaha, Nebraska. The present; winter.
Lewis’ play is about two such unmoored young people. Iris, 18, feels trapped in her job at a crematory and wants to get out of Omaha. When Baker, 21, breaks into the funeral home to say goodbye to his recently deceased wife, he and Iris struggle, with humor and hope, to understand the dismantling of their workingclass lives and to conceive a future that makes sense for them both before their pasts, and the police, catch up with them.
Founded in 2000, Palm Beach Dramaworks is a professional theatre company in downtown West Palm Beach with a mission to engage and entertain audiences with provocative and timeless productions that personally impact each individual. We are dedicated to our vision “to enhance the quality of life through the transformative power of live theatre.” Consistent artistic excellence over the course of our history places Palm Beach Dramaworks at the forefront of the artistic landscape of Palm Beach County.
Carter Lewis is the prolific playwright of dozens of fulllength and short plays. His work has been produced in regional theatres around the country, including several in South Florida. Lewis’s most popular works include Golf With Alan Shephard (1994), Women Who Steal (1999), While We Were Bowling (2004), Evie’s Waltz (2008), The Storytelling Ability of a Boy (2009), The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider (2011), The Americans Across the Street (2012), and With (2017; read in the 2018 PBD New Year New Play Festival).
Lewis was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, and after several years in Norfolk, Virginia, was raised with three sisters in Columbus, Ohio. His father, William, was a career Navy pilot, and his mother, Gaynelle, an Army nurse. Lewis enrolled at Otterbein College (now University), where he received degrees in theatre and philosophy. First interested in a career as an actor and director, Lewis had an opportunity to write a play while an undergraduate, and the experience shifted his focus to playwriting.
After studying for his master’s degree in playwriting at the University of Oklahoma, Lewis worked as a freelance playwright and educator. He taught or was playwright-in-residence at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, Cornell University, Geva Theatre in Rochester, NY, and at his alma mater, Otterbein. Recently, Lewis retired as the playwright-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis, where he joined the faculty to teach playwriting and dramaturgy in 1999. He currently lives in St. Louis, and spends his time writing, golfing, and researching horse racing for a new play.
The Science of Leaving Omaha was commissioned by Washington University in St. Louis, where author Carter Lewis was the playwright-in-residence for over two decades. Lewis began writing The Science of Leaving Omaha in 2019 for a planned production in the university’s 2020-2021 season. Due to the pandemic, the production was cancelled and PBD producing artistic director William Hayes invited Lewis to workshop the play virtually at PBD. After two successful readings here, Hayes scheduled the play for the 2022-2023 season. In the interim, the play was produced at Washington University, but the PBD production is the professional world premiere.
In an interview for the Washington University newspaper, Lewis said about the play: “I wanted to write about working-class kids. Government and corporate sectors have abandoned them. Amongst workingclass adults, substance abuse, single parenting and [depths] of despair are at their highest levels since World War II. So, if you are a working-class kid, there’s a good chance that your family is broken, your education was limited, and opportunities for life-sustaining employment are just not there anymore. What options do they have now?”
In The Science of Leaving Omaha, Baker and Iris allude to hopelessness and anxiety about their futures. According to separate studies from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), anxiety and depression in Americans born in the late 1990s and early 2000s (commonly referred to as “Gen Z”) are on the rise.
The HRSA study commenced in 2016, and though the global pandemic exacerbated anxiety and depression in young people, fear and hopelessness were climbing long before 2020. According to results from the HRSA study, first reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, between 2016 and 2020 there were significant increases in diagnosed anxiety and depression in children. Simultaneously, decreases in physical activity and the emotional well-being of caregivers (and an inability to cope with parenting demands) were recorded. During the pandemic, there were significant annual increases in children with diagnosed behavioral or conduct problems and simultaneous decreases in preventive medical care visits. There were also increases in unmet health care needs and growth in the number of young children whose parents quit, declined, or changed jobs because of childcare issues. According to the CDC, only 6 in 10 children (59%) received treatment for their anxiety during their study, and just over 5 in 10 children received treatment for behavioral disorders. These trends contribute to a growth in depression and anxiety, with feelings of hopelessness increasingly affecting young people’s mental health.
One of the major contributing factors to ill health in American youth is poverty. According to the Center for American Poverty, nearly 11 million of the estimated 73 million children in the United States live below the poverty threshold. Reduced access to healthy food, housing and health care have contributed to both
physical and mental health issues in children 17 and younger. As children are unable to work themselves out of poverty, youth are dependent on adults and social safety net systems for assistance. Compared to other leading industrialized nations, the United States frequently lands last in social assistance programs for children.
In The Science of Leaving Omaha, Iris tells Baker that she is the daughter of an incapacitated, alcoholic mother, underscoring Iris’s anxiety and loneliness. According to the American Addiction Centers, living in a chaotic, debilitated environment as the child of a low functioning alcoholic parent can lead to the development of certain dysfunctional characteristics. These dysfunctions can lead to relationship issues, and negatively impact a child’s psychological wellbeing. Codependency is common in people who grow up with an addicted parent, and is a trait of a person who has developed unhealthy behaviors and coping skills. Common codependent behaviors and traits include enmeshment (no clear relationship boundaries), the lack of a coherent identity, difficulty in recognizing what constitutes normal behavior in others, and excessive denial of issues or problems.
A codependent person is often under the illusion that they are aiding the alcoholic parent through “helping” behaviors, but are most likely perpetuating the addiction. One of the most common traits found in children of alcoholic parents is a sense of hyper-responsibility or feeling responsible for things beyond their control, such as a parent’s happiness or drinking habits. Hyper-responsibility may develop if another parent or guardian does not assume the role of family caretaker. Frequently, children develop a lack of responsibility if they feel that everything they did to assist their family was ineffective at changing their circumstances or having their own needs met. Many times, this leads to feelings of personal deficiency and a “what’s the point?” mentality.
According to the American Addiction Centers the following are some of the common characteristics of adult children of alcoholics :
• The inability to trust yourself or others
• Hypervigilance in social interactions
• Feeling hypersensitive to comments from others
• Prioritizing the needs of others above your own
• Using conflict avoidance techniques, such as withdrawing physically or emotionally
• Feeling disconnected from your feelings of anger
• Being unable to express your feelings in appropriate ways
• Strong avoidance or escapism behaviors
• A diminished capacity to deal with negative emotions in others
• All-or-nothing or black-and-white thinking, meaning they see people and circumstances as all good or all bad
• Creating crises when there aren’t any
• Low self-esteem and a lack of self-worth
• High tolerance for inappropriate or poor behavior in others
A home centered on an alcoholic parent can undermine a child’s ability to develop proper adaptive behaviors that can help a child deal with stress later in life. Children of an alcoholic parent often report higher levels of stress and tend to have a difficult time coping with stress. This stress may develop stronger tendencies toward emotional dysfunction when compared to children raised without an alcoholic parent.
One of the most important indicators of good mental health and coping skills as an adult is a child’s attachment pattern to parents. According to The American Addiction Centers, children with an alcoholic parent displayed more anxious and less secure attachment to their parent and had fewer feelings of hope than children with a non-alcoholic parent.
According to the Cremation Association of America, cremation as we know it today began about 150 years ago, after years of experimentation into the development of a dependable chamber. After Italian professor Ludovico Brunetti perfected his crematory and displayed it at the 1873 Vienna Exposition, the cremation movement began almost simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the United Kingdom, the movement was championed by Queen Victoria's surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson. Concerned with disease and other hazardous health conditions, Sir Henry and his colleagues founded the Cremation Society of England in 1874. The first European crematories were built in 1878 in Woking, England and Gotha, Germany.
In the United States, Dr. Julius LeMoyne built the first crematory in 1876 in Washington, Pennsylvania. After residents in his community suffered fatal illnesses with similar symptoms, Dr. LeMoyne concluded that the culprit was linked directly to poor burial practices. He believed contaminated matter from buried and decomposing bodies ran into the community water source, producing disease. Cremation, he felt, would eliminate disease-ridden contaminants from leeching into the soil and water. Despite hesitation and fear, LeMoyne assured grieving families that the crematory he designed and built on his property produced flames that would never touch the remains of their loved ones.
Champions of early cremation were Protestant clergy who sought burial reform, and medical professionals concerned with health conditions in and around cemeteries. In the late 19th century, crematories appeared in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Detroit and Los Angeles. By 1900, there were 20 crematories in operation in the United States. When Dr. Hugo Erichsen founded the Cremation Association of America in 1913 there were over 10,000 cremations performed at 52 crematories in North America.
Now accepted by a growing number of religious affiliations, exponential growth has been constant. There were 595,600 cremations in the United States in 1999, 25% of all recorded deaths. By 2019, there were over 1,500,000 cremations at 3,000 crematories, 54% of all deaths in the United States.
An enlightening series for adults. Each rich, multifaceted course probes the play’s big ideas, and creatively examines the characters, themes, social relevance, and viewpoints expressed by the playwright.
Dramawise includes two ‘acts’ with an intermission, and participants may select to attend all or a portion of the program.
10:00am – 11:30am
Begin the day with an in-depth, revealing discussion of the play and playwright led by PBD’s director of education and community engagement, Gary Cadwallader. Participants in Act 1 receive a helpful, comprehensive study guide and a copy of the script prior to class.
11:45am – 12:45pm
Lunch at a downtown West Palm Beach restaurant
1:00pm – 2:00pm
Attend a stimulating and informative discussion with our production’s cast, director, and creative team as they reveal how PBD’s production is assembled and rehearsed. Gain insight into the creative process, and contribute to the conversation.
August: Osage County – Thursday, March 30
Topdog/Underdog – Thursday, May 25
palmbeachdramaworks.org/Dramawise
CONTACT THE BOX OFFICE AT 561-514-4042 x2
