Plays can have a long gestation period—a writer might notice that they’re thinking about a theme, have an idea about a structure or setting, find inspiration in rereading a classic. The catalyst that moves notes into a structure, a situation, a play in progress can likewise take many forms. For James Ijames, the pieces of Wilderness Generation came slowly and then all at once. He knew he wanted to take on a big-set, big-family, big-feelings play. He felt the pull of Anton Chekhov’s classic real estate play The Cherry Orchard, with its multiple generations and sense of a shifting era. But he found his key insights in a 2023 Atlantic article by Faith Hill, “The Great Cousin Decline.”
The piece (available in full here) traces the demographic reality that as families in the United States shrink, most Americans are now growing up with fewer siblings, yes, but also with fewer cousins. Hill writes about the particular—she calls it the “weirdest”—space that cousins can occupy in each other’s lives: “Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.”
Hill tracks research that finds the mix of familiarity and distance in the bond between cousins—they generally are spaced further apart in age, they are more likely than siblings to live in different neighborhoods (one study found cousins live an average of 237 miles apart), but of course they share grandparents, memories, and sometimes a last name. This familiarity without self-identification yields some unexpected connections. Sociologist Megan N. Reed found that in the height of the pandemic (fall 2020), people were nearly as likely to reach out to cousins (24.4%) as they were to reach out to siblings (31%), conjecturing that the fact that there is some distance between cousins—they are unlikely to ask for material support—“makes them well suited to give emotional solace.”
But more than anything, it was this idea of a cousinhood in decline that struck Ijames as he created the relationships between the Maxims—divided by choices that their grandparents and parents made, brought together over a weekend of packing up their grandparents’ house, and forced to confront the ways they love and have hurt each other.
Cousins, says Ijames, have “a relationship that is unique. It feels really deep and really close.” In looking at a demographic shift away from these relationships, Ijames tracks what could go missing as future generations lose the potential to repair relationships that the children of different parents but one set of grandparents can offer each other. “In the play, the cousins take on a shared set of tasks; the weekend starts to put them in relationship,” Ijames says. And these interactions combined with their shared memories allow his characters to “work messily” through the fractures between them. “They have to look the hard questions dead in the eye. Every generation has to do it,” he says.