Listen to Your Mother started in 2010 with one city, twelve women, and a microphone. This year, 32 cities will give a voice to motherhood, creating a new way to celebrate Mother’s Day nationwide. 2014 marks the third annual Listen To Your Mother: NYC, and our third completely new show and cast. We are thrilled to have been a part of LTYM’s truly incredible growth.
Over the last three years of Listen To Your Mother shows in New York City, our casts have featured some bold-faced names: working actors, published authors, television hosts. But the true heart of Listen To Your Mother exists in the everyday person who has a story to tell, and in the audience member who hears that story and sits up and says, “Me too!” That is such an empowering connection, whether you’re speaking onstage or listening in the dark. By sharing our stories—our triumphs, our fears, the day-to-day things that define our experiences as mothers and as human beings– we learn that our voices have value, and that we are not alone.
Each Listen To Your Mother show chooses a charity that serves women and children in its local area. This year, LTYM: NYC is proud to support the Women’s Prison Association, a non-profit organization committed to helping women with criminal justice histories see new possibilities for themselves and their families. We first found out about WPA from one of our LTYM: NYC alums, Alysia Reiner, who plays Fig on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. She has become deeply involved in their organization and to us, it was a perfect fit for LTYM: NYC. WPA validates the stories of the mothers it serves while helping them write new futures for themselves and for their children.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the mother in your life than to buy her tickets to a Listen To Your Mother show—whether it’s LTYM: NYC, at Symphony Space on May 4th; LTYM: NJ, at the South Orange Performing Arts Center on May 10th; or in any of the 30 other LTYM cities with shows in the coming weeks.
If you’d like to get a feel for what Listen to Your Mother is all about, check out our YouTube channel, featuring the hundreds of stories that have already been told in LTYM shows since 2010. My only warning to you: get comfortable. Once you start listening, you might want to stay a while.
Listen to Your Mother: NYC is part of a 32-city movement this Mother’s Day season, with over 500 women and men taking to stages nationwide to tell stories of motherhood that are hilarious, heartbreaking, and everything in between. See LTYM: NYC in action on Sunday 5/4/14 at 5 pm at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, New York City.
For tickets: CLICK HERE
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