WHY WE GO TO FLORIDA

About WHY WE GO TO FLORIDA

Constance has just lost her husband, Mike, after 60 years of marriage. But his sudden death isn’t the only grief inside her as she prepares for his wake at the southwest Florida home that they shared. The sting of losing her son, Henry, to HIV/AIDS 15 years earlier is aroused again with the arrival of a stranger at her home: Henry’s partner, also named Henry, has come to express his condolences — and to make a connection with the mother-in-law he never knew, in a place where he was not previously welcomed. Constance’s daughter, Amy, emboldened by alcohol and threatened by Henry’s appearance, shares memories of her brother but also questions the motives of the outsider, even as she hides a secret about her own family. Henry’s audacious visit is met with an equally audacious invitation. Constance, a drinker herself, asks him to stay the night in the guest room — Henry’s old room — setting the stage for an overdue confrontation about the late Henry’s life and death, the surviving Henry’s guilt and goals, and the staunchly conservative family’s role in the decline of their golden child. The play’s poolside conversations — dark, funny, humane, honest, touching — address prejudices and perceptions, mirroring “coming out” exchanges that still go on today. But following the decades-long delay of addressing the realities of their family tree, is hope still possible for a mother who needs a son, a son who needs a mother and a sister who seems to only need a drink?

“Why We Go to Florida” is the result of a lot of things that I’ve experienced or heard over the years on the subject of LGBTQ people coming out of the closet. For some, “coming out” might seem like an almost quaint topic, in the age of marriage equality, but the struggle is real for millions of people who grow up in communities that are intolerant and downright hostile about anything that is “different.” The act of telling the truth about the experience of your identity is still a thing. I became interested in a fresh take on the coming-out ritual, through the lens of middle-aged and senior people: I envisioned something about an aging mother who never had “the talk” with her gay son — and never would because he died of illness before HIV/AIDS was treatable. I also knew that I wanted to write a comedy. Like my play “Alabama Story,” I built “Why We Go to Florida” on the foundation of clear opposites: conservative and liberal, gay and straight, brother and sister, parent and child, wellness and illness, spiritual and secular, grief and acceptance, sobriety and addiction, funerals and weddings, silence and communication, tears and laughter. At an earlier reading of the play in Salt Lake City, a gay man and his parents approached me with tears in their eyes. The father said, “We sure have lived some of this story.” I hope you come to fall in love with what’s both specific and universal about my play, and that maybe it inspires communication where before there was only silence.

This play is a time capsule, a period piece, a remembrance of attitudes, perceptions and prejudices that existed — and still exist. Most everything spoken in the play is based on words spoken directly to me or to my LGBTQ+ friends. This is about silence — and the talk a son and a mother never got to have. They are finally having the talk now, but not with their blood family. This is how the conversation might have gone with their respective families had timing and circumstance allowed it.

As long as there are forces shoving people into the darkness, coming out stories will be relevant, necessary and alive. And if you think we’re beyond these stories, you only have to look at the alarming attempted suicide statistics in the LGBTQ+ community, particularly among queer youth