Celia Keenan-Bolger Grows Up: Playing a Mother to Sarah Ruhl's Oldest Boy

By .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) 11 Nov 2014

Sarah Ruhl and Celia Keenan-Bolger, the playwright and star, respectively, of The Oldest Boy, chat with Playbill.com about meditation, motherhood and different ideas of love.

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Meditation is nothing new to Sarah Ruhl and Celia Keenan-Bolger, the playwright and star, respectively, of The Oldest Boy, Ruhl's new play in performance at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre.

"We meditated every day before rehearsal. We've sort of fallen off during tech," Keenan-Bolger said during a dinner break from tech rehearsals."I was thinking the other day, we should have really been meditating during tech," added Ruhl.

The drama opens with the Mother, played by Keenan-Bolger, meditating while using an iPhone app. But her inner peace is quickly disturbed when a monk and a lama appear at her door, claiming that her three-year-old son is the reincarnation of a revered Buddhist teacher. Per Tibetan Buddhism tradition, she is faced with the decision of whether to place him in a monastery in India.

The concept is something Keenan-Bolger's character, a Cincinnati-born woman who marries a Tibetan man, struggles greatly with.

"I think Buddhism has brought an enormous amount of peace to this character. It's explained some things and made decisions in her life easier," Keenan-Bolger said. "And then she gets to a point with the religion and turns around and is like, 'Now I'm going to ask the greatest thing of all from you,' which is the hardest thing she's ever had to go through. And I think that's a very real way to go through life. You can't just pick and choose the parts of something that are helpful to you. You generally have to take the whole package, and that often means it will be uncomfortable."

Continued...

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Celia Keenan-Bolger Grows Up: Playing a Mother to Sarah Ruhl's Oldest Boy