playnext.fm

Good Grief

Going to Loveland

·57 min·5 clips
Anne Randolph wrote Loveland to deal with her father dying and mother's stroke, using outrageous comedy to explore grief.
Host Cheryl Jones welcomes Anne Randolph, a playwright and performer, to Good Grief. Anne talks about her early influences, including her funny and irreverent parents, and how she was often in trouble for her humor in school. She describes her journey into comedy and character work, inspired by figures like Carol Burnett. The conversation centers on her play Loveland, which she wrote to process the concurrent losses of her father dying and her mother having a stroke. Anne explains that Loveland blends outrageous comedy with deep emotional themes, allowing her to explore grief through the character Franny Potts. She shares how the play was born during a writing workshop when a character's voice came to her on an airplane, leading to a story framed around memories of national parks with her parents. Anne discusses the audience response to Loveland, where people often stay after the show to write and share their own loss stories, transforming strangers into a community. She reflects on how humor opens people up to discussing grief and how her own vulnerabilities on stage give others permission to speak. The episode also covers Anne's career challenges, including working at a homeless shelter for ten years to support her art and a devastating Broadway experience where her show closed due to lack of marketing after Mel Brooks' wife, Anne Bancroft, was diagnosed with cancer. Anne recounts falling into depression after this failure but being helped by friends and patrons to recover. She concludes by noting how these losses have made her more fearless in her creative work.

As heard by us

An airplane-window image opens a thoughtful conversation about grief, memory, and national parks.

Good Grief gives grief a clean dramatic shape through the image of looking from an airplane window toward a national park. The conversation follows a writer who had been journaling about her parents while stuck on another project, then began hearing Franny Potts and found a…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You get a grief story that comes through as Franny Potts speaking on an airplane.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on
Apple PodcastsSpotify
Play clips from this episodeMore from Good Grief