By Hannah Story
Lee Lewis doesn’t talk much about the loss of her son and daughter. She has turned down the chance to direct plays that tell stories like her own because, she says, making theatre requires artists to look directly at all the ideas and issues in a work.
“I’ve always been very cautious, for myself emotionally, about doing plays that talk about children dying,” she says. “I haven’t been in a place where I’ve been willing to share that knowledge because it’s just too painful.”
To direct Tiny Beautiful Things, which transfers from Queensland Theatre to Belvoir in Sydney this month, Lewis faced her grief head-on. She recalls being moved as she was reading the play, which is based off a collection of advice columns by Cheryl Strayed (Wild), by the author’s response to a letter from a man who had lost his son.
Mandy McElhinney, here on set, was drawn to the love and strength in the play.Credit: Janie Barrett
“There were words that she was using that were so unusual and clear and kind of extraordinary,” Lewis says. “If they can help me, then other people need to hear them because there’s not a lot of things that can help.”
The play by Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) is an adaptation of Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, which compiles the columns she wrote under the pseudonym Sugar from 2010 to 2012. It stars Mandy McElhinney (Mosquitoes at Sydney Theatre Company) as Sugar, who answers the letters as she tidies up her house, with the rest of the cast performing as the writers.
A 2023 TV adaptation of the book, starring Kathryn Hahn and produced by Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern, was nominated for two Emmys this year. But don’t come to the play expecting to see a traditional narrative like the TV show.
Instead, the play luxuriates in Sugar’s words, and in her radical empathy and vulnerability. As Strayed wrote when she revealed she was Sugar: “I’ve always written the column as if I were a naked woman standing in a field showing you everything but her face.”
McElhinney was drawn to the love and strength in the play and in Strayed’s writing. “It asks us all to be better people, and to love each other more,” she says. “[Strayed is saying], ‘This is your life, you should be living it the best you can. And you should forgive yourself. And you should love yourself’.”
It’s advice McElhinney has heard before, from a friend who died from cancer at a young age. “Watching her suffer and watching her fight it and watching her in the end accept it, that was the best advice ever,” she says. “And that’s: ‘It’s your life. And you decide how you want it to be’.”
That message, paired with the sense of connection nurtured in the theatre, feels urgent after the isolation of the pandemic. “After the previous few years we’ve had, I think there’s been a real desire to sit in that [theatre] space with other people and connect to them, and share the grief and pain that we’ve all been dealing with,” McElhinney says.
As an actor, McElhinney is used to accessing her feelings of grief to embody a character. But she notes the way Tiny Beautiful Things invites everyone in the room to experience big emotions together.
“It gives people a very safe place to feel some pretty big emotions,” she says. “It has proved to be incredibly healing for me and for the audiences that come to see it.”
The play is not all stories of grief and hardship. There is a great sense of levity too, including in a letter from a man deciding whether to dress up for his girlfriend who thinks Santa is sexy.
Lewis points out that is true to life; there is humour in our most tragic moments. When she was in the hospital waiting room after her son died, she remembers the song playing on the radio: Kylie Minogue’s I Should Be So Lucky.
“I remember sitting with my husband, and we just laughed,” Lewis says. “Tears were pouring down my face. But that was what was on the radio.”
“It was funny then, and it’s funny now. That’s life. Sometimes life is more farce than tragedy. It’s ridiculous. And I think [Strayed] has a sense for the ridiculous.”
Tiny Beautiful Things is at Belvoir St Theatre until March 2.
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