This week, I was torn as to whether to comment on a recent New York Times article about “What Women Want,” a segway from Freud’s famous question, or to comment on the current artistic project I am working on. Luckily, you will be spared from gender biases and speculations this week because my project is a lot more interesting.

I’m staying in Long Branch, NJ, a town at the Jersey Shore, working at a theatre on a new play by Zayd Dorhn called SICK. The theatre is a haven outside the city to premiere new works by playwrights on the scene.

SICK is about a lower Manhattan family who believes their children are “ill.” The younger son has multiple health ailments including extreme asthma, allergies, “reactions,” and sensitivities. He is diagnosed with Borderline MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity). Apparently, all of us in the family have it, but that’s also a matter of opinion. The brother’s condition keeps the family hyper-reactive, and the “outside” is considered very dangerous.

When an objective outsider, the father’s (a renown poet/professor) graduate poetry student, visits the home, the older daughter (also a poet and played by yours truly) is awakened to the fact that she has to escape the house, experience the world, and publish.

Living in the play has been so interesting as the playwright has left many things curiously ambiguous. A lot of this is about the question of what is real and what is not real, and of manifestation and timing. It makes me think of people who think of terrible things happening to them, and then create those things in their lives. Of course, we could also think of wonderful things and then create them in our lives. Obviously that is the better way to go! But not everyone thinks that way and lives in the worst-case scenario instead.

I’m not going to reveal the plot, of course, but I’ll tell you there are going to be air filters on stage as well as people wearing gas masks in their own home. So, you get the extremity here.  We have a very wonderful and precise director manning the ship and it’s very well cast. A lot of us know people in our real lives with major allergies and ailments and how that can affect the family.

In real life, I’m staying in a country house near the theatre, and I take walks to the beach in my spare time. What can I say?  Mermaids need to retreat to the water, even in winter.