My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding

“This is a story about hot lesbian action . . . and my mother,” opens My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding (MMLJWW) at Pandora Productions, an LGBTQ+ theatre company housed in the Henry Clay Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky. MMLJWW is an autobiographical musical by David Hein and Irene Carl Sankoff, the writing team of Tony Award-winning musical Come from Away. In the musical, the character of David operates as a sort of narrator, playing the guitar onstage and addressing the audience directly throughout. “My mother’s lesbian Jewish Wiccan wedding was gay,” David sings in the introduction, preparing the audience for the cheerful irreverence they can expect throughout the evening. The Henry Clay Theatre is a fairly intimate black box space in a curved proscenium arrangement, with each seat close enough to the stage to catch every nuance of spacing and expression; on the night I was there, a Thursday, the show was sparsely attended, but the audience members present interacted with each other and theatre staff with the feeling of old friends returning to a familiar space. The stage set the expectation of the metatheatrical piece, with projection screens on either side showing pictures relevant to the topics being referenced, the band visible onstage, and flexible set pieces that served multiple purposes This metatheatricality is inherent throughout, for example, when Irene is supposed to meet David’s moms for the first time, and he is running late, she asks him on the phone: “Are you still playing with the band?”MMLJWW tells the story of David’s mother (Claire) divorcing his father and leaving their Nebraska town for a professorship in Canada. There, she rents a room from a younger lesbian woman who introduces her to the community choir, her activist community, and Jane, the titular Wiccan with whom the previously theoretically-straight Claire falls in love. A young actor plays a younger version of David who joins his mother in Canada to go to high school, swapping with the adult David when David begins dating his eventual wife, Irene. The love stories of David and Irene and Claire and Jane are set against the backdrop of the fight for marriage equality in Canada and cover a great deal of ground, including Claire’s difficult relationship with her mother and ex-husband, the evolution of marriage equality in Canada, and an entire song set in a Port-a-Potty. The musical’s principal cast are supported by a small multicast ensemble that shift fluidly between many characters both real and imaginary, such as, for example, a bevy of “hot lesbians”—in cutoff flannels and short shorts in the Louisville production—in David’s father’s dream sequence about his lesbian ex-wife, or both sides of a marriage equality protest. While there are certainly serious moments and the musical has a subtle activist bent, the overall tone is upbeat and fun, a world with a default state of security and safety to which characters can return after challenging experiences. Likewise, the music is uncomplicated and playful, a small guitar-led band playing a score of slightly folk-leaning musical theatre fare with many comedic upbeat numbers and a few ballads in comfortable singable ranges that prioritize acting over vocal gymnastics. In a field where queer stories, and especially stories of queer religious characters, almost universally find their stakes and conflict in narratives of trauma, it is refreshing that this musical makes its home base in the warmth of community and the safe harbor of love.I was a very newly out college student when I saw MMLJWW in 2012 at Auburn Public Theatre as part of the Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival. My theatrical representation of queer women to that point had been largely limited to Stop Kiss and the “lesbians from next door” in Falsettos, so I was utterly charmed by the autobiographical musical including (in that iteration) performances by Hein and Sankoff as the fictional versions of themselves. I’d quietly leaked disbelieving tears throughout that turned to a torrent in the mid-show protest song, “A Short History of Gay Marriage in Canada,” in which a marriage equality rally is interposed with an up-tempo recitation of the history of marriage equality in Canada and parts of the United States; I was simultaneously in awe at the resilience of my community and grieving how far we had to go.1I have thought about MMLJWW fondly in the intervening years—it is even briefly referenced in my dissertation exploring queer people of faith in musical theatre—and kept an eye out for news of the musical’s development, but as Come From Away gained prominence and marriage equality advanced in the United States, I worried that the musical’s moment had passed. Even if it were to be performed again, the events of the musical were very time- and place-specific; would the show be hopelessly dated when the time of its performance stretched ever-further from the time of its events? I was delighted and disheartened to find that Pandora Productions’s 2024 production of MMLJWW still felt incredibly relevant thanks to both minor (but clever) lyrical updates and the simple truth that the present moment and the cultural moment of the musical aren’t that different. As a Hooters waitress offers in a moment of faux-depth that returns as a significant theme later in the show: “Wherever you go, there you are.” The tautology seems apt for the musical’s current relevance—while the US has had marriage equality for nearly a decade and Canada for nearly two and the dominant cultural narrative is that we’ve come pretty far, we certainly aren’t far enough for LGBTQ+ folks to find themselves safe from legal oppression or for Jewish folks to be free of antisemitism.Claire and David are Jewish, from a family sufficiently observant that David’s grandmother refuses to attend his wedding because it’s in a church, though David notes that “we’ve never been Jewish-Jewish, just Jewish.” While Claire’s Judaism is positioned as a source of pain for her throughout much of the show, it is clear that it isn’t her heritage that has harmed her, but others’ expectations of and reactions to it. She chafes against her mother’s expectations of regular lifelong synagogue attendance and refusal to see her as she is (at intervals throughout the show Claire answers her mother’s phone calls, defends her life choices, and hangs up with a “shit, shit, shit”) and against the difficulties of growing up as a Jewish child in an antisemitic community: “There’s the school where the kids called me ‘k*ke,’ there’s the church where they told me ‘all Jews have horns,’” she tells Jane while they’re back in Nebraska for Claire’s mother’s funeral.Religiosity and homophobia are often synonymous in the US cultural imagination, but this conflation occurs in a context in which Christianity is presented as the dominant religious system. While some movements of Judaism have historically been more accepting of LGBTQ identities than others, it is not unusual for religiously observant Jewish people to also be a part of the LGBTQ community without faith-based conflict, and MMLJWW does not display tension between Claire’s faith and sexuality.2 Instead, Claire’s embrace of her romantic feelings for Jane and recommitment to her Judaism are positioned as equally consequential acts of self-discovery. When Claire initially comes out to her son, she begins the conversation with, “there was an old me . . . and now there’s a new me . . .” and sings about her relationship with Jane in a funny, frantic song. David eventually interrupts her, saying, “Dad has a girlfriend, I don’t see why you can’t.” When she meets with David and his wife to share that she’s decided to explore her faith again—shortly after marriage equality is legalized in Canada, so David and Irene expect her to be sharing that she and Jane will be getting married—she uses the same melody and lyrics to introduce the idea. Again, David interrupts with a message of acceptance: “I’m fine with you liking women. Hell, the whole country’s fine with you liking women.” And again, she launches into another comedic song, this time joined by background singers and dancers who pull Claire into dancing a hora with them, underscoring her faith exploration as a window to connection. In a cultural moment when antisemitism is on the rise, it was moving to see a character whose Judaism was a clear source of community, meaning, and pleasure in active defiance of antisemitic forces.Wicca similarly serves as a vehicle for belonging within the musical. Witches, as Chrystina Dail explains in the introduction to Theatre History Studies’s special section on witchy performances, have often appeared onstage in alignment with a wide variety of tropes: as threats to the patriarchy and the “good” women who uphold it, as wise women tending their communities, as lone activists in a world gone awry, as scapegoats for the ills and worries of the community, and much more.3 When Jane reveals her Wiccan faith to Claire, she clearly expects the American to have a trope-based understanding of witches and heads off this expectation, singing:Witches don’t have crooked teethAnd, look, no cavitiesAnd I am rarely flyingOr defying gravity!Jane continues to explain the basics of Wicca to Claire, including a primer on the holidays she observes and the Rule of Three, a central tenet that suggests that any energy sent out into the world comes back to the sender threefold (which is, Jane explains, why witches don’t cast bad spells, only good ones). Witches are outsiders, Dail explains; that is their only representational common denominator. “Treatment of witch characters onstage mirrors what in their offstage communities may be perceived as an innate human desire to destroy or condemn what is feared, misunderstood, or undesired. Interrogating why witches are present in performance allows us to better understand the complex social constructs undergirding a cultural moment.”4 The primary reason a witch is present in the performance of MMLJWW is, of course, that Hein’s real-life stepmother is Wiccan. The character of Jane does in many ways function as an Other against which the norm is constituted; she’s an activist who’s led a life of whirlwind adventures, putting her in sharp contrast to “Claire from Nebraska” who positions herself as having lived a deeply unexciting life. Jane takes the reporter’s camera from everywoman Irene at a protest rally to expertly deliver talking points and she and Claire threaten sexual patriarchal norms by discussing nonpenetrative options for sexual pleasure with David’s fiancée. The musical’s fond portrayal of a character clearly outside heteropatriarchal norms seems to invite the audience to question the world that could see her as dangerous or undesirable from within a community that unquestionably adores her.It is tempting to describe MMLJWW as escapist, a little queer Utopia conjured by a cis-het guitarist that doesn’t connect to the reality of the challenges of queer lives. Homophobia exists in the world of the musical, but it operates from afar, as an unseen and unheard mother on the phone, brief protests in a piece of a verse of a single song; the central conflict, to the degree that one exists, is about self-trust, not escaping oppression. On the day of her wedding, Claire—after running away—calls back the memory of the Hooters waitress saying, “wherever you go, there you are,” coming to the realization that the driving force of many of her life challenges has been self-doubt and self-abandonment, actions marrying Jane supports her in leaving behind. The musical ends with a joyful Jewish/Wiccan wedding pulling significant ritual elements from both faith traditions. But there is nothing escapist about the musical. Images of Hein’s mothers’ actual ceremony onscreen underscore the show’s grounding in real-life source material. More to the point, the musical remains connected to the reality of the present moment. This is partly due to lyrical updates; the 2024 version of “A Short History of Gay Marriage in Canada” not only folds in the dates of marriage equality in the US, but the reality that queerness is still punishable by death in some parts of the world, that the fight for true equality is ongoing and didn’t stop with the right for a wedding. This reality, underscored by recent attacks on trans rights around the country, also allows a contemporary audience a different kind of understanding of ourselves as part of an ongoing unfolding of queer rights than I suspect an audience would have had in the years shortly after marriage equality was legalized in the US when much of the dominant cultural narrative was that queer rights had fully “arrived.” In the current moment of precarity it is easy to see the fierce defiance inherent in the queer joy onstage, and the audience was clearly as eager for the froth and fun as the tension. The night I went the audience was small but vocal, a crowd covering the adult age spectrum who laughed loudly throughout and fell to sharp silence in moments of tension.Progress isn’t linear. This production of MMLJWW seems even more aware of that than its earlier iteration. But watching this musical as a thirtysomething woman in the town where I grew up, a decade past enjoying it in a professional new works festival in a blue state, I was newly aware of the hope offered by the musical’s consistent uplifting of intentional community, even when community feels scary or hard. History will keep unfolding and we can’t always choose wherever we’re going, but we can choose to be there together.