Uncovering Family in One-Woman Show, ‘Finding Home’

As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”

That’s what playwright Meighan O’Brien realizes in her new one-woman play, “Finding Home.” Meighan mines her past, the rich ores of belonging and abandonment, and discovers the gold, the gleaming present of a joyous and evolving selfhood.

She came to theater late in life, a direct result of singing with the McKinleyville Choir. The choir director mentioned that “The Sound of Music” production at the Arkley needed nuns, and she and other choir members became the three singing nuns in the 2015 musical. After an acting class with Ruthi Engelke at Redwood Curtain Theater, Meighan was hooked.

There was doubtless a bit of inheritance in all of this, as Meighan describes a mother who had a “theater gene” and, as a young woman, had pursued a Broadway career, but got children instead. Her mother loved musicals and, as a child, Meighan learned many by heart.

Alas, although Meighan yearned for the innocence of those musicals, like many other children in the post-WWII era, her family seemed bound up by the tragedies of earlier generations. Although the adults didn’t seem at all inclined to speak of them, the feelings seemed to influence much of their behavior, becoming the children’s inheritance.

“Happy families are all alike,” Tolstoy observed in the first serial installment of “Anna Karenina” in 1875, “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Engrossing literature generally doesn’t focus on happy families. Ditto for theater.

More recently, while caring for her aging mother with severe dementia, Meighan had time to contemplate her family’s unspoken history. As it became apparent that her mother would soon pass, Meighan decided it was up to her to delve into her own past so that her life moving forward could be more truly her own.

At this time, while taking a ceramics class, she found herself creating a clay child with a chain attached to its umbilicus. Meighan realized her child-with-chain symbolized her relationship to the emotional bloodline of her family. In that moment, her “Orphan Girl” theater project was born.

Meighan wrote and performed the first “Orphan Girl” at Dell’Arte in March 2025. Then, with a lucky draw of her name, she reworked it into a longer solo show at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in August.

In “Finding Home,” Meighan celebrates the gold of familial kinship we discover when we take a lantern into the dimly lit chambers of our own child’s hearts.

Meighan will perform “Finding Home” at the Exit Theater, on Friday-Sunday, March 6-8, as part of the Arcata Playhouse Zero to Fierce Festival. Also see Portland’s Andrea Parson performing her play, “The One” on the same dates. For info, visit theexit.org. See page 6.

Carol Moné lives in Trinidad.