Grief and grace, one year later

“Monday’s Child is fair of face/Tuesday’s Child is full of grace/Wednesday’s Child is full of woe/Thursday’s Child has far to go,” reads the rhyme of old. While the verses sound like little more than astrology for the nursery, they have remained strangely potent. And one verse, the one about babies born on Tuesdays, somehow fits our memory of one Tuesday morning just about a year ago.

Tuesday’s child—shaken, broken, angry and scared, but still, full of grace.

Tuesday’s Child, created by Jeanmarie Simpson and L. Martina Young, is a theatrical performance response to Sept. 11. The script was inspired in part by interviews conducted after Sept. 11 with local artists including poets Gailmarie Pahmeier and Shaun T. Griffin and actress Mary Bennett, as well as by the writings of celebrated poets, playwrights and lyricists ranging from Shakespeare to Leonard Cohen. Its cast is small, and the performance’s directors are passionate about their message.

”Tuesday’s Child connects the dots between historic events that have shifted us as a people,” Young says. “It looks at us, all our characters, as archetypes of humanity: Poet, Pragmatist, Wise One, Cynic and Angry Young Man. … [It will] embrace the alpha and omega of our human blueprint—disbelief, compassion, grief, anger, disintegration and the confluence of grace.”

Theater artist Simpson and dance artist Young have collaborated on nine other projects. Simpson says that their tried-and-true working relationship has made the experience of creating Tuesday’s Child an especially powerful one.

“We have worked together so many times and have known each other through so many different stages of our lives that there is a comfort factor present when we work together—a comfort level that allows us to go to the most uncomfortable places artistically and know that we are safe to fail and to soar,” Simpson says. “It’s quite extraordinary.”

Young says that the making of Tuesday’s Child was not a forced process—the move from visceral reaction to artistic interpretation was fluid.

“I didn’t have to shift out of my place to make a dance or make some kind of statement, or do anything outside of where I emotionally and physically was. … I was simply still processing the experience.

“I felt I had not legs to stand on, that I was rendered in a kind of paralysis.”

Tuesday’s Child embraces that feeling of shock, that sense of frozenness and fear, rather than infusing the script with the sort of sermonizing one can only muster when the heart is back from exile and the guts are back in place.

“When you’re in that mourning state, you do nothing but be there,” Young says. “Like any other animal that retreats, hunkers down—in illness, in death, in preparing for closure—there is a going into the cave, there is a being in the darkness.”

And perhaps we are ready to relive that darkness, if only for a day of somber retrospection, a day of memory to honor those who died.