New York’s Bated Breath Theatre Company and RRR Productions have announced that they have optioned Susan Cain’s New York Times #1 bestselling book “BITTERSWEET: HOW SORROW AND LONGING MAKE US WHOLE“ and will adapt it for the stage.
Acclaimed theatre-maker Mara Lieberman will write the adaptation in collaboration with Cain.
Oprah’s first Book Club selection of 2023, “BITTERSWEET: HOW SORROW AND LONGING MAKE US WHOLE“ weaves together poignant stories of loss and resilience, the author’s personal experience, art, literature, religion, and science — from Darwin to epigenetics — to explain why longing and loss are so deeply profound, inspirational, and transformational to the human experience. BITTERSWEET makes a case for embracing our grief, longing, and melancholy as a doorway to the sublime and connection with our deepest places of creativity and compassion.
BITTERSWEET: THE PLAY will follow one mother’s journey to attempt the impossible after the tragic loss of her child. With the promise from the Buddha that he can resurrect her daughter if she can procure a mustard seed from a house not touched by grief, she sets out on her journey to return to the perfect world of her past by visiting the doorsteps of the future. On the other side of time, she meets musician Leonard Cohen, writer Maya Angelou, scientist Charles Darwin and others who transformed their incapacitating grief into offerings that forever changed the course of history.
How far would you go to return to the perfect and beautiful world before your heart was broken?
Bated Breath Theatre Company is best known for its award-winning, immersive, pandemic-friendly walking tour productions Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec and Chasing Andy Warhol.
