There is no logical way to be in a family – an essay on Find Me Here by Bailey Williams

If theater attempts to transform the “I” into “we,” then so do families. In Crystal Finn’s Find Me Here, we are dropped into a moment of attempted familial cohesion. Two sisters wait impatiently for the third, who has once again chosen to prioritize herself over a ritual of togetherness. (In other words, she’s in the bathroom). This is one of the keystone stories of this family and in the way of family stories, it is the past, the present, and of course, the future. 

This is the magic trick of Find Me Here, the way the instruments of theater (time and performance) intermingle with the stuff of families. There is even a familiarity to the set up: three sisters, a recent loss, a will, a family home. We know this story, we might  think. It’s Three Sisters, Lear, August: Osage County, maybe even The House of Bernarda Alba, but with fewer sisters. But then, within moments, the will is read. It’s what everyone expected. Nancy, the responsible caretaker, gets some money. Dee-Dee, exuberant and flighty, gets the house so she can fulfill her dream of installing a hot tub below the back deck. And Deborah gets nothing, because she prioritized herself over the ritual of togetherness. (In other words, she joined a cult 25 years ago.) Well, that’s that!

But of course it isn’t, because of the way time works in families. There’s no resolution, only a habitual re-enactment of what has come before, the daily performance of shared history. These sisters are older, but they’re also every age they’ve ever been and in conversation we hopscotch from Thanksgiving fifty years ago, to a year ago when Daddy died, to what happens when we age? What happens when we die? 

We meet the next generation. Dee-Dee’s adult son, Gabriel, enters to announce lunch and to wonder, with a kind of childlike tenderness, if he has been made sick by imagining himself to be like his grandfather. Kristen, Nancy’s daughter, cannot tell the difference between her invisible child and a ghost. People break away, mid-conversation, to ruminate on death, desperate for some privacy. These moments feel like portals, entryways into a deeper grief-time, where we can luxuriate in the strangeness of here-ness. I am here, we are here, who is not here, and one day, in fifty years, here will have to be a little further away from the mountain, because otherwise the house will fall off the cliff.

When I watch this play, I am overcome with a powerful sense that this is my family, even though my family is very different, and I am once again a kid, invisible, listening to the adults talk in the next room. I am learning that everyone has a role and not everyone likes their role, and there is something both unpleasant and reassuring about someone telling your story to you so confidently. This who you are, they say, I know because I was there. 

And then the chafing! Why do I have to believe what you believe? Why is it so important for families to share a reality? 

At moments, Deborah — who abandoned her two sons and spent most of her life in a sex cult in Fiji — seems the sanest. Forge your own path, eat carrot mash, and transcend! At other moments, like during dinner, when the family is at peak hilarity settling into a cozy rhythm of food orgasms, logistics, and kids, butter-loving Dee-Dee seems to have figured it out, finding her “bliss” exactly where she sits. Why leave, when life everywhere is “full of wonder and beauty and every moment feels like a goddamn gift.”

“I don’t want to go,” Kristen says, before she is due to leave. “Stay,” Dee-Dee tells her. “I don’t want to stay either,” she replies.

Later, her mother Nancy echoes her. “Oh God. When they are here I just find things wrong with it all. And when they are gone I am so sad.” 

Find Me Here plumbs this beautiful conundrum of existing as an “I” in a “we,” the lifelong calculus of loving your family and finding them intolerable. Many plays have suggested that it is impossible to go home. Crystal delivers a stunning rebuttal in Find Me Here. It is possible to leave and come back and leave and come back, that this is in fact the lifelong work of being part of a family. As long as you know— whether it is in the shadow of a mountain range or “a little cobweb somewhere”— where to look.