GM: Kathleen De Smet
Players: Kate Hill (NPC), Cin, Lin, Nat Budin, Aaron Sunshine, Sean Nittner
System: Grandma’s Resting Place
Pitch
It’s been three years since Grandma Dot’s cancer diagnosis, and the last two annual family beach parties have been centered on her long—and happy—goodbyes. Now she’s passed away in a hospital far from home. Rather than turn her body over to the usual pipeline of hospital to funeral home to cemetery, the family took it and drove off in their RV to take her home and decide what to do.
Casting
The character I played in this game (Kelsey) was closer to home than I usually play. A dad in his 40s (check) who had abandonment issues about his kid (check), trying to sort things out with a family who doesn’t understand him and never really made an effort to understand him (check, check, and check).
Kelsey’s story is different than my in many ways. I didn’t abandon my kids, but I did get divorced when they were young even with joint custody, the guilt that follows not being there for them more is one of those “congratulations, you’re an adult, you get to feel bad for the rest of your life” kind of things. So even if our particulars were different, the emotional core was the same. That’s also why I don’t have pics for the game. I just dressed as me (albeit with a silk handkerchief Karen lent me for flair).
The Sitch
We took Grandma’s body from the hospital as were driving away in our RV trying to decide what to do. We all had different ideas about what should happen next, but mostly we had different ideas about what happened before. Joe was driving, because Joe (my older brother) was the responsible one. The rest of us moved around between the front and the back of the RV as we recounted old stories and realized how different our experience were.
Two of the main mechanics in the game were monologues (non-interactive) and memory scenes (interactive). In the monologues, Kate (as Dot) would stand in front of us and speak to the audience about who she was and what she wanted. She was wracked with guilt, anger at others, anger at herself, as well as so much for her children. In the memory scenes we were given a prompt as a player to read out loud “I remember when…” and then we’d play out a scene with Dot from when she was alive. Both of these would interject new perspectives and new stories that kept the substance of our conversations growing and deepening.
For me the most meaningful conversations, which were all broken up over time, were with my brother Joe and my son River. Joe and I were the classic older/younger sibling duo. He was a responsible lawyer, I was a wandering artist. He was married with a son in pre-med, I left my kid to be raised by my mom and was delighted he decided to be a carpenter. Joe thought his son Taylor was going to be happy when he was a doctor, I thought Taylor should be happy now. And a lot of those things are personality traits that can probably never be resolved. But what made this game magical was that we had the context of old memories to compare that still gave us the chance to dig in. We talked about our experience at the commune (he hated it, I loved it). We talked about our kids (he was overbearing, I was absent). We talked about our memories of mom (he always felt I was loved more than he was, I never thought about it at all).
Joe was a good person, maybe a better person that Kesley, but he was also so self destructive and so demanding of his son, that I couldn’t let him be. I had to appeal to his love for me, for mom, for Taylor, and for everyone else, to lighten up, if just a little bit, and to let the trapped bird that was his son’s life, free from the same cage Joe had locked himself in.
Talking to River was much harder. Both because of my own personal guilt, and because there was no right answer. River didn’t want me to feel guilt or apologize forever, he just wanted me to be his dad. I realized I wasn’t ever going to forgive myself, but telling him that just made him feel guilty for as well. So I had to put on my big boy emotional pants and sit with me own pain and regret instead of making it someone else’s problem. There was a terrible scene in the beginning where Joe and I were sitting up front talking about River and he was just listening to us talk about him like he was a sack of potatoes. But the good thing was that we did finally have the talk (or many talks) and while we didn’t solve all our problems, we did decide to build a flower box at the beach house in memory of Dot.
Much of the conversation of the game was about what to do with Dot. To bury her, to cremate her, to send her off in a Viking long boat. It was wild to see how our thoughts about death have so much to do with our own thoughts about life and what matters. Learning that Aunt Pat was secretly in love with Dot’s first husband Larry because she wanted to be buried next to him was amazing.
Thoughts on the Game
This game meant a lot to me. I really appreciated the emotional integrity of everyone there, especially Lin (who played Joe) as I think that it would have been easy to cast Joe as the villain, but really he was a human who hurt just as much (honestly, a lot more) that all of us. Kate also did a phenomenal job portraying Dot. She gave the character such depth and realness that it made everything we were doing (as dangerous and ridiculous as stealing the body of our mother from the hospital) feel real.
At the end of the game we debriefed and talked about our own family dynamics and how close to home the game hit for us. Learning that the story about “Aunt Flora’s ashes” was REAL (something that happened to one of the designers) was wild!
Grandma’s Resting Place carries so much emotional weight and makes the difficult conversations around those emotions accessible. It’s an incredibly well designed larp and I got to play it with incredibly genuine and grounded players. Can’t get better than that!
