i love you and i always will or charlie's play at Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater

What does it mean to grieve different and fully feel pain at every turn? When does grief become inescapable and undeniable in us all? When is it selfish to hold on to the past and immortalize our mortal memories? What does it mean to die, and what does it mean to live? How do we all grapple with loss differently while all feeling loss at the same time? 

 After losing a good friend, Charlie, to cancer, Tommy spirals into a grief journey guided by her newfound obsession with immortalizing her friend as a warped way to cheat death. In stepping backwards through time, Tommy wades through memories past and present, attempting to reconstruct Charlie to the best of her ability. Wrought with the looming fear of the mortality of memory and life which has become fully realized before her, Tommy grieves and asks us what it means to be mortal, and what it costs to defy death in such a perverse and horrific way like compulsive, unnatural, imperfect immortality. Exploring life, love, loss, and grief through poetry, movement, multimedia expression, and song, this play makes Charlie immortal and in doing so, binds us all together in our own mortality, in our eternally mortal collective scream of grief.