“I wanted to write about the American family,” says Rachel Bonds about her play Curve of Departure. “What it looks like now, how families are made in unexpected ways.” The members of Curve’s unlikely family have found ways to connect across abandonment and divorce, disease and uncertainty. They look nothing—but of course everything—like the American family.
Felix is traveling home—well, not home, but traveling to see his family. His long-absent father Cyrus has died, and his boyfriend Jackson has convinced him that it’s better to regret going than missing the funeral. After Cyrus left, Felix’s mother Linda stuck with her father-in-law Rudy through his wife’s cancer and the onset of his own Alzheimer’s. Rudy’s now in the middle stages of an ever-advancing disease: he’s kept his sense of humor but is losing his memories as well as some bodily control. Curve of Departure traces the trajectories of these disparate relatives coming together to say a last goodbye—and test their own familial ties.
The play unfolds in urgent and whispered plans, overheard exchanges, the forced intimacy of a shared bathroom and the emotional pressure cooker of jetlag, displaced grief, and an alien landscape. While Felix grew up in Cincinnati, his father spent the rest of his life in Santa Fe, and his family has gathered in a small hotel room to wait for the funeral—auxiliaries to the main rituals of mourning, the visitation, the post-funeral brunch. No one feels exactly fondly towards the deceased—Rudy calls his son a “schmuck” and not in the endearing sense. But during a late night of revelations small and profound, Felix, Jackson, Linda, and Rudy reflect on the man who got them all in the same room, grappling with the shadow he’s left on their lives and the legacies they hope to leave themselves.
In deference to the tight quarters (two double beds and a cot in a single room) and awkwardness of the situation, everyone’s trying to support each other. They steer wide of any mention of the changes already in motion in each of their own lives: Felix and Jackson are facing a sudden and life-altering decision about their futures; Linda hasn’t yet told her son about the sacrifices she’s planning to take care of her father-in-law; and Rudy has made his own decisions about his remaining lifetime.
But because no one knows you like family, these secrets don’t stay buried for long. Bonds unfurls these secrets masterfully, as one intimate but strained conversation collides into another, triggering a grandparent’s devotion, the paralysis of self-loathing, the fear but also hopes of parental love. While these tensions fade to awkward silence or crescendo towards confrontation, Bonds also works in a third time signature—the suspended storytelling past, as Rudy’s newfound lyricism finds him sketching out descriptions of treasured places and people both present and long-gone.
Both in rhythm and content, Rudy’s stories suspend time, bringing a broader sense of his eight decades (brought into tart relief by the ways Alzheimer’s is taking some details that bind him to the present). Felix, for his part, finds his own time compressed into a single decision, one he’s making within the now-explicit shadow of his father’s past and decisions. Family is hard; loyalty is hard: he sees all his mother has sacrificed for a man who isn’t even her own father. Can he trust himself to make a life-long commitment? Is he making an ill-advised commitment he will need to free himself and others from in time? Whose son will he be: Cyrus or Linda? Is it possible to live in both legacies?
Bonds’s consideration of how we bind ourselves to others plays out across racial as well as generational lines—Linda is African-American, Rudy’s ancestors were Eastern-European Jews, Felix carries both legacies, and Jackson is Latino. The story their bodies tell together on stage is one of unexceptional Americanness, but one Bonds yearned to see on stage: “On one level, I’m just bored of seeing the same kinds of people on stage all the time. I enjoy writing for people I don’t get to see enough of and want to see more of.”
And at the same time, writing beyond her personal experience allows her to reflect on the ways that people find home in different places and align with other people to remake their image of home. “I don’t know exactly how we go about making a family for ourselves; we’re all stumbling around the world looking for some sense we once had—if we’re lucky—of being comfortable and safe and understood.”
This search is profound, of course, and continues to develop over a person’s lifetime. But Bonds is a master of distillation. Her theatrical currency swells in an internal but instrumental shift of perspective—the moment an audience realizes that an insight has landed on a character, that a window to change has opened, that a character is likely to take that opportunity. The stakes are high: the emotional transactions in Curve of Departure concern the nature of parenthood, responsibility, and sacrifices immediate and consequential. Bonds’s pitch-perfect evocation of small moments with life-size repercussions resonate beyond her play’s compressed timeframe, aggregating into a tense and tender look at the impossible and ferocious love between one generation and the next, and what it is to know someone, what it is to let them go to one future or another.