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QuickTake:
The new work of devised theater features four women performing monologues, movement pieces and more about the travails of being middle-aged, caring for parents and children at the same time and more. It started as a series of workshops where people were free to vent and explore their questions about life at that stage.
Marietta Hedges knows people are waiting for her to die. Often, that message is delivered in the mail.
Advertisements for cremation services. Burial companies looking to sell her an advance plot. A seminar on buying private ambulance services, delivered over a complimentary (yet limited) Red Lobster dinner.
“You can get popcorn shrimp for $14.99, but they never offer you a lobster,” said Hedges, who is 65 years old. “I’m kind of baffled and upset by that: They want me to go and sit through this seminar, but they’re not going to give me a lobster at Red Lobster.”
Instead of never opening another piece of mail, Hedges has been collecting her morbid mailers for a distinct purpose. A stack of them will be a stage prop for “Women of an Uncertain Age,” a new piece of devised theater where women will be sharing their experiences of life in middle age and beyond.
And Hedges’ death-centered mail is fodder for a comedic monologue she’ll be delivering.
She is one of four women performing in the show, which opens Aug. 14 at the Oregon Contemporary Theatre in downtown Eugene. The project began as a series of informal workshops, which started in 2024 and ran off-and-on for about a year and a half, but they weren’t intended to build toward a larger stage work.
“Women of an Uncertain Age” is the latest piece from Narrow Shoes Productions, David and Jeany Snider’s theater company. While Jeany Snider is a writer and performer in the ensemble cast of four women, David Snider is the director, having taken notes and observed during the earlier workshop sessions at the Very Little Theatre.
Jeany Snider said the project came from a need to honor the questions she had about life at 57 years old, and a suspicion that others felt the same way.
“It’s tough to wait for an opportunity to be in a rehearsal of another play that’s scripted. You have to get cast, and it can be tough to have the means and justification to pay for an acting class or a workshop,” she said. “So we just created our own place to do the craft.”
Workshopping life at middle age
The workshop sessions didn’t take extensive prompting to get the performers unpacking the travails of being a woman in middle age, Jeany Snider said. There would be props — scarves, stuffed animals, gadgets — to get them started, but found that daily life alone had enough prompting.
David Snider pointed to one session where everyone was wearing a kitchen apron and started performing a domestic task. That soon turned into a broom flamenco, where performers swept rhythmically while whipping around their aprons as if they were long, dramatic dresses.
“More often than not, we would just start with something aggravating that was in our lives, even on the way there, or that had happened the day before,” Jeany Snider said. “We were so full with our own current griefs or frustrations that we would start with that as fodder.”
For Christine Madzik, that fodder was heavy. The workshops came as Madzik was in the thick of dealing with the declining health of her parents, Gary and Penny Mathis. As the show premieres this week, it’s after the death of her father and worsening health problems with her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease and recently entered hospice.
Madzik, 46, said she’s one of the first people in her age cohort who has been handling their parents’ health issues, now part of the “sandwich generation” that cares for both parents and children (hers are 9 and 13 years old).
We were so full with our own current griefs or frustrations that we would start with that as fodder.
Her material for the workshops was rooted in the new, confusing realities she found herself in, such as grieving her parents over time as they declined, and navigating hurdles of arranging Medicare coverage for her father’s stay in a rehab center.
“Maybe the prompt was something like, ‘What are you coming into the room with today?’ or something as simple as that,” she said. “I was just so ready almost every time to just be like, ‘Let me tell you what I’m coming into the room with today: This is how broken our healthcare system is.’”
One session that made it into the final performance, has her crouching on the ground, hunched under an imaginary weight to represent the strain she was under. Jeany Snider walked over and sat on her, remarking that it seemed like a nice place to sit.
Madzik’s response will be familiar to anyone who turns to stoicism under strain: “Oh, I’m grounded. I’m so, so grounded.”
From years of workshops, to a show
The final product is a mix of adapted work from the workshops and new written material, including solo sections like Hedges’ monologue, ensemble pieces like the broom flamenco, and interactive portions involving the audience.
For David Snider, the sole man in the room and the one who had the responsibility of taking notes from the improvised workshops, the moments he witnessed were “for lack of a better word, sacred.”
“They were at home in conveying good story while they were just offering their truths,” he said. “So almost everything in the hall felt stage-worthy.”
Jeany Snider said turning years of informal, emotional workshops into a stage-ready work — all under a runtime of 85 minutes — meant paying careful attention to how the plotless pieces could be woven together.
“It’s more like a crazy quilt, and as you keep arranging the patches and seeing how they resonate next to each other, which ones are in the whole of the quilt, what kind of palette fits, and then in which order,” she said.
The exact fibers of that quilt may change on any night. Audiences will pick from one of 13 boxes with an interactive prompt for the cast to address. Performers have also been emboldened to do what feels right in the moment, and have permission to modify what they’re saying based on what’s happening in their lives.
Part of Madzik’s contribution to the show will be reading from a real letter she wrote to her mother. It’s too long to be read in its entirety, so she will instead read whatever part feels most relevant to her life at the moment.
She’s optimistic it will feel relevant to the people watching, too.
“I hope there are people in the audience who have gone through what I, and we, have gone through who feel like, ‘Yes, yes, this is what I need to hear,’” Madzik said. “‘I’ve been there. I see myself.’”
How to see ‘Women of an Uncertain Age’
- When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 14, and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Aug 15-16
- Where: Oregon Contemporary Theatre, 194 W. Broadway, Eugene
- Tickets: Available online starting at $20
- Note: The show will run about 85 minutes with no intermission. It is recommended for audience members 12 years and older.
