Writing Fragments Home
Jeffrey Lo
Hillbarn Theatre & Conservatory
Forty-year-old Jay awaits anxiously with luggage in hand for his mom to get home from work, nervously practicing various ways of saying, “Hi, Mom, it’s good to see you/How was work?/I’m sorry … can I move back home?” When Mary Beth walks in, her first reaction? “What’s wrong?… What are you doing here? … I told you, you should have been a nurse … Like me.” After all, “nurses don’t move back home with their parents.”
For aspiring playwright Jay who has just lost his job at American Theatre, whose girlfriend of eight years recently walked out on him, and whose notebooks are full of empty pages as his writing slump is now feeling permanent, that was not the greeting he wanted but probably the one he expected. After all, Mary Beth and his deceased dad, Ronaldo, immigrated to the U.S. as a young couple from their beloved Philippines in order to make a good life for not-yet-born him. And here he is at 40 asking to move back home with his pockets and life totally empty.
Believe it or not, this is Jeffrey Lo’s set-up for one of the funniest, yet most heart-felt shows I have seen in a long time. Hillbarn Theatre & Conservatory opens in world premiere Lo’s latest, new play, Writing Fragments Home, in a production that is very much a love letter to his own mom, a Filipino-American nurse, and to immigrant parents of all nationalities who arrive on these shores hoping for the best lives possible for their current or yet-to-be-born children. With a stellar cast of five under the direction of Reed Flores who pumps both imaginative jocularity and heart-felt emotion into scenes soliciting much loud laughter and eventually silent tears from the audience, Hillbarn’s Writing Fragments Home is a newly born play that is definitely a must-see.
Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the remainder of my review.
Rating: 5 E, MUST-SEE
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Writing Fragments Home continues through May 4, 2025, in a two-hour (plus intermission) production by Hillbarn Theatre & Conservatory, , 1285 East Hillsdale Blvd., Foster City, CA. Tickets are available online at www.hillbarntheatre.org or by contacting directly the box office by emailing boxoffice@hillbarn.org or by calling 650-349-6411.
Photo Credit: Mark Kitaoka
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