Families Are Families, even when onstage.

Last night Mom and I went to see Immediate Family at the Booth Playhouse, which is one of those theaters that feels like you’ve wandered into somebody’s oversized living room—if that somebody had great lighting and a bar in the lobby. I’m not sure there’s a bad seat in the house, and ours were definitely not bad, which is always a relief.

I didn’t know much going in except that it was a play (not a musical) and that it had something to do with family. Turns out it was about sibling dynamics in a Black family—but really, families are families, and there’s always dynamics.

The character I latched onto most was Ronnie, the older sister, who had basically been forced into the matriarch role after their parents died. She was bossy, brittle, and impossible to please. Ronnie drove everyone crazy but eventually confesses to her brother’s boyfriend Kristian about how much she’s been hurting. And that’s when the play really landed for me: her speech about watching her parents live the kind of life she thought she was supposed to have—one that always seemed just out of reach—was raw and familiar.

The kicker? The life she wanted was mostly an illusion. She’d seen her parents at their happiest moments and mistook that highlight reel for the whole story. By the time she “arrived” at her own version of it, the people she’d wanted to arrive for were gone. Her parents had passed. Her marriage hadn’t worked. Her favorite brother had moved on with his own dreams. It was heartbreaking, but in a way that makes you nod along, because who hasn’t built castles out of somebody else’s snapshots?