As This Trip Reminds, What’s Passed Down May Haunt You

Roommates, family baggage, and long-lost exes all pile in for this theatrical road trip. Gold, the latest from local playwright Marcus Gorman, runs at Annex Theatre (on stage and streaming) through 2/8. 

In the arts, generational trauma feels like it’s having a big moment. From movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Turning Red, and Encanto, to the novels of Celeste Ng and Min Jin Lee, to works by playwrights Jeremy O. Harris, Dominique Morisseau, and James Ijames, it feels like a lot of metaphorical chickens are coming home to roost in our collective consciousness.

Marcus Gorman’s new work, Gold: A True-ish Jewish Story, on stage now at Capitol Hill’s Annex Theatre, joins the conversation, taking a semi-comic look at how the sins of the father (or in this case, grandfather) are worked out by the next generation. And the next, and the next … 

In Gold, 19-year-old college student Frankie Gold (Rebekah Nachman) makes a promise to her grandfather, Charlie (Graham Arthur Blair) on his deathbed: burn his “little black book” and never speak of it again. But Frankie, fascinated by this window into a side of her grandfather she never knew, and hungry for answers as to why her family seems doomed to be unlucky in love, lies to her parents (played by Dan Posluns and Courtney Morales) about her vacation plans and embarks on a cross-country road trip with her roommate Mona (Megan Huynh) to track down some of Grandpa Charlie’s former flames (all played by Sophie J. Sen). Will the intrepid pair be deterred by a lack of funds, an inadvertent acid trip, and a disco interval featuring psychedelic dinosaurs? Time will tell. 

Gorman, a longtime Annex collaborator, cites Neil Simon as one of his main influences, and that flavor of gently neurotic quippiness certainly suffuses this slight but winning piece. The inciting deathbed incident apparently stemmed from a friend’s real-life experience; the play’s also been fleshed out with autobiographical elements from Gorman’s own family life. 

Nachman brings a sort of little girl mischievousness to Frankie while still managing to add layers of pathos and uncertainty. She shines in scenes with Huynh’s Mona, whose comedic timing is on full display, and with Posluns as Frankie’s gently snarky, slightly sad-sack dad. But the real scene-stealer is Sen, who manages to fully embody each of the four women she’s called on to play, making each sharply distinct from one another (a feat bolstered in no small part by the excellent costume design from Kacey Kamps). It’s a credit to Sen and Blair, as well as to director Jasmine Joshua, that each scene between Charlie and one of his lovers — sultry Sandra, earthy Nancy, or HBIC Nancy — teases out different elements of Charlie’s personality and the motivation behind his philandering ways, while still leaving the audience with plenty of unanswered questions. That sense of never fully taking in the whole picture is amplified by the stage design from Bella Rivera, with heirlooms and pieces presumably from Charlie’s past suspended at the back of the stage, like a museum exhibit, mid-explosion. You may be able to piece some elements together, but, like so many things in life, you’ll probably never get the full story. 

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Back to that generational trauma. It’s Mona, a biology student, who brings up “traumatic epigenetic inheritance” as a potential answer to Frankie’s sense that her family, maybe due to Charlie’s misbehavior, is “cursed” to a legacy of failed relationships, which spurs the action of the piece. 

A 2022 article in Scientific American lends a wider lens to the matter:

[W]e’d assumed that it had something to do with being raised by parents who were suffering from the long-term emotional consequences of severe trauma. Now it looked like trauma could leave a trace in offspring even before they are born. … 

An important question is whether epigenetic alterations in stress-related genes, particularly those reflected in the offspring of traumatized parents, are necessarily markers of vulnerability or whether they may reflect a mechanism through which offspring become better equipped to cope with adversity. This is an area we’re actively exploring.

It is tempting to interpret epigenetic inheritance as a story of how trauma results in permanent damage. Epigenetic influences might nonetheless represent the body’s attempts to prepare offspring for challenges similar to those encountered by their parents. As circumstances change, however, the benefits conferred by such alterations may wane or even result in the emergence of novel vulnerabilities. Thus, the survival advantage of this form of intergenerational transmission depends in large part on the environment encountered by the offspring themselves. 

— Rachel Yehuda, “How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children”

It’s intriguing to finally have at least some scientific evidence for what we’ve been expressing in our art for eons, that sense that we literally carry the pain and suffering of our ancestors around with us. Gold tempers that academic bent with a certain welcome practicality: even if we carry the past with us, we still have to live in the here and now, so we’d better figure out how to make it work.  

Gold runs through 2/8 at Annex Theatre on Capitol Hill. Tickets are $5+ (pay-what-you-choose offered for all), here. Accessibility notes: restrooms are gender-neutral and single-stall; theatre is located up significant stairs without elevator, and restrooms are not wheelchair accessible. Masks are required for all performances. Performances are also available via livestream.

Run time: 2 hours 10 minutes with intermission  

Jill Farrington Sweeney is a Texas ex-pat getting to know the Seattle-area arts scene, and is perpetually on the hunt for good Mexican food. Her writing has appeared on TheaterJones, Onstage NTX, and NWTheatre.