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Jonatha Brooke stars in the one-woman play “My Mother Has Four Noses” playing at the Duke on 42nd Street in New York City.
Jonatha Brooke – How We Met Her Mother
by Jay S. Jacobs
A few years ago, acclaimed singer/songwriter Jonatha Brooke had to put her career and life on hold when her mother was afflicted with Alzheimer’s and dementia. For two years, Brooke, her husband and a cousin took on the full-time positions of caretaker and watched as her mother Darren Stone Nelson, a respected poet and author, was robbed of her eccentric and funny life force.
However, despite the tragic implications of everything which was happening, Brooke and her mother could not help noticing the beauty and humor of the situation as well. In her more lucid moments, Brooke’s mother would ask “Are you getting this down, Boolie? This is pure gold.” [Boolie was Brooke's mother's nickname for her daughter.] Even as she was dying, Brooke’s mother was inspiring her creatively.
The experience led to Brooke’s provocatively-named one-woman musical play My Mother Has 4 Noses, which Brooke is currently performing at The Duke on 42nd in New York. The play is a rumination of death and disease, but it is also a loving and funny tribute to the life and eventual passing of her irrepressible mother.
The title is not as impressionistic as it would immediately seem. In fact, in a very real way, Brooke’s mother did have four noses – prosthetic ones. A devout lifelong Christian Scientist, Nelson had refused to seek medical help, in keeping with the church’s dictates, in an earlier case of cancer on her face. By the time the pain forced her to finally give in to medical treatment, the cancer had spread and Nelson had to lose her nose. For the rest of her life, she wore false noses.
Still, Brooke’s mother was not the type to wallow in self-pity. The situation just became one more thing for the irrepressible woman to joke about. Years later, Alzheimer’s might steal her mind and her life, but it could not take her sense of flair and humor.
After decades as an acclaimed and popular singer and songwriter, first popping onto the music scene as half of the beloved late 80s folk duo The Story, Brooke has much performing experience on stage. Still, it did not totally prepare her for the idea of Broadway theater. However, Brooke created the book and twelve songs for the play and took it on the road, doing successful readings in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. This led to the first actual stagings of the show in Connecticut and Minneapolis and at the Fringe Festival back in Philadelphia.
Now the New York resident has come full circle, bringing the show back home to Broadway for a long stint. The music from the play has also become Brooke’s latest CD release. Soon after My Mother Has 4 Noses opened at the Duke at 42nd Street in the heart of Manhattan’s Times Square area, we caught up with Brooke to discuss her show, her career and her mother.
Your one-woman play My Mother Has 4 Noses tells a very personal, difficult story. Was it daunting to get it all out and how hard is it to share some very dark stuff on a daily basis?
It’s very daunting to get it all out. It’s funny, because every time I embark on a new project, whether it’s a record or some kind of written blog or whatever, I do write it and I just get it out. Often it’s only after the fact that I realize how much I’ve said. (chuckles) So, there is a little bit of that, but there is a little bit of “Well, I have to tell the truth.” This is my story and this is how it needed to be told. This is how it feels most natural to me. That’s the yin and the yang of creating art. You just have to be truthful and go to the mat for it.
You bring a good deal of humor to the story, in particular in the first act. Was it difficult to lightly celebrate her life at the same time as you have to tell about her physical and mental decline?
Yeah. I think that was one of the most essential parts of it for me. To balance it out and find that fine line of how much is too much on either side. It’s part of my nature. I’ve always been a storyteller on stage, so even as a touring recording artist for the last 20 years I have tried to break up the songs with crazy stories and vignettes and being funny. I’ve been more and more drawn to that. Mom was hysterically funny, so I really wanted to amplify that. Also, amplify that crazy… I don’t know if dichotomy is the word… but crazy, funny stuff happens in the most despairing and dark moments. I have that kind of brain that splits into two. On the one hand I think I’m going down with grief, on the other hand half of me is watching the cremation guy come in with the gurney and thinking oh my God, this is so crazy funny. (laughs) How could this actually exist? This is happening. I think that by telling those stories on stage, it gives the audience permission to laugh at these horrible things. Because you have to, or you will go down.
Both your mother and father were professional writers. Do you think artistic temperaments can be passed down in families? Or perhaps just being immersed in it so much can get you into writing?
(laughs) I think, yeah, that’s my suspicion. My brothers and I are all creative types. My brothers – one is an actor and a teacher and the other is also a teacher and an incredible writer. Essayist. So I think we certainly share this incredible love and respect for language, telling a story and trying to write as capably and evocatively as we can. Certainly our parents would correct every grammatical error, no matter what, all through our lives. Even into her late dementia, mom was correcting us on our pronouns. (laughs)
You have lots of your mother’s possessions on stage with you when you do the performance. You also show lots of old pictures on Power Point slides. Does that help it feel that she is there with you?
Definitely. It helps me reconnect to the emotion when I’m accessing those intense moments of the vigil, or reading her poems. That’s a very intense way to reanimate the emotions that I need to act now, because it isn’t as fresh. It’s not like I’m reliving it every night. I am accessing the actor part of myself. Her possessions really help to do that.
In the play you have a clever line about when you finally left the Christian Scientist religion behind, when you discovered that Advil works. However, I’m sure in real life it was a lot more difficult decision to move on from a belief you had been brought up in. How did you really decide you had to move on?
It was very gradual and kind of crept up on me. I have to say that, I mean, the Advil is a great gag, but it’s kind of true. That was this definitive moment. I had very severe menstrual cramps my entire life. Like really, really severe. My friends would beg me, “Please, would you just try? Please just take this. Please.” When I finally relented, it really was like the heavens parted and the sun shone down. There was this incredible hum of relief. I thought: Oh my God, they weren’t kidding. (laughs) I had poo-pooed it all those years. But the real evolution was gradual and kind of like a default, because Christian Science was all I knew for so long. Even though I wasn’t following its tenets, I wasn’t going to church, I wasn’t reading the lessons, I didn’t really go anywhere else. Whenever there was a crisis, even until I was about 30, I would kind of run home and go back to church, in a way. Because I didn’t know any better. Then once I started finding my own way, and Advil, and had a couple of medical crises that I did choose to deal with with medicine, it was really intense. I felt like I had to confess to my parents, look I’m going to go to a surgeon for this. And they were lovely. They said of course, it’s your choice.
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