THE STORY: In a mental facility in New York, Gabby Stone, a quiet unassuming, guilt-wracked widow, has come to collect her daughter, Nicole, who has been institutionalized for over a year following a suicide attempt. Mother and daughter are a mismatched couple; Nicole, in a mild manic state, is witty, brilliant, artistic, passionate and wildly courageous. Gabby, sharing her worries with the audience, reads the worst into the radical notions her daughter expounds and is threatened by Nicole’s views on how Gabby’s life must change. Obsession is the core of Nicole’s illness and the motor that drives her: from wanting to save Gabby, to saving the world; to enjoying everything beautiful in life, to deciding that the cat she long ago relinquished to her ex-husband needs to be restored to her own safe keeping. Trying to gain order in her life, Nicole drags a reluctant Gabby through a whirlwind of adventures that include Karate lessons, demonstrations, lectures, work at a Brooklyn day care center, and finally to kidnapping Isabella, Nicole’s cat. While on this roller-coaster ride, Gabby begins to understand the torment her daughter has been suffering and gradually becomes an ally. They bond, but Nicole, in trying to fill the gaps in her disoriented life, is eventually overwhelmed by her illness and her thwarted plans. She heartbreakingly spirals down and once again must be institutionalized. But she has left Gabby transformed. A new woman, Gabby is focused, fearless, empowered, formidable, the kind of mother and friend Nicole will need when she once again emerges from the hell-hole of mental illness.
“NOT WAVING…which focuses on the relationship between a retired widow and her recently deinstitutionalized adult daughter…is at times sharply funny, at other times nervously funny…And while there is considerable distance between the retiring personality at the beginning of the play and the empowered being that Gabby becomes at the end, the development rings true.” —Variety.
