Thanks for coming to our website to learn more about ‘Once In a Lifetime, Again’.

Writing the book, lyrics, and music to ‘Once In a Lifetime, Again’ – and the exhilarating experience of working with actors, directors, and musicians to bring it to life in readings – has been, well, a once in a lifetime challenge. I have been delighted by the reception it has received from theater professionals and audiences alike… and pleased to hear that it has caused more than a few conversations in households with what I will call "vintage demographics." As Jesse Davidson asks at the outset of the show, “Hey Boomers – it’s 10:00. Do you know where your relationship is?”

I’ve long been puzzled why more has not been written about the sudden changes to gender roles experienced by the young men and women graduating college in the 1970s and early 1980s. Most grew up with one archetype for family life: Dad goes to the office, and Mom stays home with the kids. Then, in a flash, it all changed.  Young women graduating from college in 1975 not only had the opportunity to seek careers, it was almost expected in a world turned on its head by the feminist movement of the ‘60s.

At first, two career households were easy enough.  But it got crazy when babies arrived. Suddenly young women were expected to be lawyers/doctors/bankers – and full-time moms.  Many young men were torn by the conflict between their traditional societal programming as “providers,” and the sudden new imperative to share the responsibilities of parenting.  Many could not navigate their inner turmoil, frustrated that co-parenting meant leaving the office at 6:00 while peers stayed, working longer hours, and winning the big promotion.

In young marriages, it all created tension, unrealistic expectations, conflict, and hurt. Some young women gave up, surrendering their careers and reverting to the old paradigm. Some marriages suffered, withered, and ultimately ended. And there were the couples who kept trying, determined that they could have it all, do it all. Perhaps those felt the most stress of all.

Welcome to the world of Jesse and Lydia Davidson, a love-at-first-sight couple whose fairy tale marriage was strained to breaking by the pressures of dual (and dueling!) careers, unequal co-parenting, disillusionment, emotional distance, and then terrifying illness.

Visit, then, the world of widower Jesse, who must learn how to deal with his rage, grief, remorse, and regret… and then set out to find a new romance in a very different world, and a very different age.

Some of the most interesting comments about the play came from the people who noted that theaters are filled with audiences that are older than 50 — but very, very few plays are about the arc of the lives of those people who are in the theater that night. Sure, some plays might take nostalgic looks at their younger years. There are dark plays about aging couples staring at impending death. And there are unserious romps like the movie “Cocoon,” that seem like a 25-year old’s view of an old-age home filled with stale, sullen, decrepit old people.

I have not seen enough theater that tries to portray what contemporary life looks like when parenting is done, retirement arrives, and life partners die. When still-vital people take stock of their lives, look for new challenges, and —for the many people who find themselves single— are filled with desire to find once in a lifetime, again.

Full disclosure: yes, there are similarities to my own life. Like Jesse, I lost my wife at far too young an age. Like Jesse, I found that writing songs enabled me to convey the powerful emotions that I struggled to process. But the play became more interesting to me when I turned Jesse into an every-man for his generation. The experiences Jesse has in this play are a complex mosaic drawn from observations of friends, colleagues, anecdotes, and an overactive imagination. The things you think might be real are often the fiction… and the stuff that sounds like fiction is likely to be that very unlikely and often unbelievable thing we call real life.

A friend who saw one of the readings of my show remarked that it was a “classic coming-of-age play.”

Then she laughed and added, “that is, if the age you are coming to is sixty-five.”

--Stephen H. Gardner
November 14, 2024