As the audience files into the room, chatting and sipping glasses of wine, a woman is already on the stage. She shuffles around, muttering, twitching, fidgeting. Her back is to the audience; whoever she is talking to is not here – if she’s talking to anyone at all. Dead leaves litter the ground. Rubbish, milk crates. The lights dim, she turns, and she begins to speak.
The play is Mother and Noni Hazlehurst is Christie, a homeless woman telling the story of her life. Christie has struggled with mental illness, substance abuse and unstable interpersonal relationships, particularly with her husband, Lenny, and their baby, named after his father but whom she secretly calls Beau.
