Splash Hatch on the E Going Down at Next Act Theatre

Thyme is fifteen, an A student, and three months’ pregnant. She lives with her parents, Marjorie and Ollie, in their Harlem apartment along with her new husband, eighteen-year-old Erry, the father of her child. Thyme is a bookworm, and her obsessive topics of the moment are childbirth (she wants to deliver in water) and the environment. Thyme is bossy with Erry, an innocent presence, who was recently hired as a construction worker, and with Shaneequa, her fun-loving best friend, also fifteen, pregnant, and already mother of an infant. Thyme judges Shaneequa by her lack of interest in books without seeing Shaneequa’s acquired wisdom: She has experience as a teen mother. Similarly despite all her readings on environmental issues, Thyme remains blind to Erry’s illness symptoms. It is only after he undergoes a dramatic seizure that she admits what she has suspected: lead poisoning, a hazard of Erry’s occupation. Thyme reverts back to denial, however, and the resultant tension in part ignites a knock-down drag-out fight between herself--eight months’ pregnant, and Shaneequa--nine. Unrelated to the fight, Shaneequa’s child is stillborn. Erry’s health deteriorates, and it takes a tense discussion with Marjorie for Thyme to visit him in the hospital. With Marjorie by her side, Thyme does deliver her daughter in water. Weeks later Erry dies. In the end, Ollie wakes Thyme to see the comet. Thyme, not so bossy anymore, nonetheless reveals her vast comet knowledge, providing a tender moment between a father and his recently widowed teenage mother-daughter, who will survive.