synopsis

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Be careful what you wish for…

Hiccup and a Wink is a gritty, four-character play about hopes and dreams and how far people will go to attain them. Set in a run-down trailer in Chattanooga, TN in the summer of 2007, the play is the story of an over-the-hill manicurist and her husband, an alcoholic, PTS-afflicted Desert Storm veteran, and their co-dependent, dysfunctional relationship. That relationship is further challenged when a sixteen-year-old, abused teenager comes looking for her birth mother, a dream come true for the manicurist, her acknowledged birth mother. But secrets and lies about paternity and domestic abuse have pervaded the couple’s lives for so long, so that the fragile relationship the teen develops with her “new family” is easily shattered when all hell breaks loose after the girl’s violent, adopted father shows up unexpectedly to stir up an already fiery cauldron. Fear, deceit, and gun violence take over, and only the improbable love between the couple can help them survive the horrors that ensue.

Plays about children searching for their birth parents often end in “happily-ever after scenarios,” though real-life situations do not always end so well. This play tries to dramatize the traumas of real life. The play also turns on its head the convention of telling such a story from the point of view of a child searching for her birth mother. Here the story is told from the point of view of the birth mother who has a whole other set of problems to contend with. Like life, her story is both joyful and sad, uplifting and depressing, and the audience goes on a roller-coaster ride as she navigates the treacherous waters of meeting her birth daughter who is not the ideal of what she dreamed she would be.