news | Tuesday July 6, 2010

Hair-Tickling Tales of Torment and Teenagers

The creators of Mom’s the Word are back with their uproarious sequel Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged. The original Mom’s the Word played to sold-out crowds at Just for Laughs in 2001. A French version, translated by Michel Tremblay and directed by Denise Filiatrault, played Juste pour rire the same year.

Jill Daum, Alison Kelly, Robin Nichol, Barbara Pollard and Deborah Williams make up the writing team for Mom’s the Word. The women create collectively, each one contributing personal stories. And each of them remembers what it was like to be a teenager.

Colin Thomas from The Georgia Straight had this to say about two of the actors after a 2005 performance of the sequel:

Deborah Williams is a particularly gifted comic writer. She talks about “falling in love so hard it hurt my hips”, and in the wake of a parenting mistake, she comforts herself with the knowledge that “I will only feel this bad about what I have done until I do something worse.” Jill Daum can also be wickedly self-revealing. She’s freaked out because she knows what a terror she was in her own adolescence. She wants to trust her son, she says, but “the coke-snorting, shoplifting slut from my past won’t let me.”

Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged is playing at Just for Laughs from July 6-18.