Watching the Tony Awards ceremony this week made me think about Father’s Day. Dramatically celebrating difference and confronting bigotry, the nominated Broadway plays reminded me of the brave efforts of my infertile and LGBTQ clients to become parents.
I was delighted that my favorite musical this year, “Kimberly Akimbo,” and its astonishing lead, Victoria Clark, won the Tony for best musical and best actress. Born with a devastating aging disease, intelligent, luminous 15-year-old Kimberly has the body of a 75-year-old woman. Understanding she will not live much beyond 16, she wants to experience everything she imagines the world has to offer while she can. Kimberly turns the pathos of her unfair diagnosis into poignant, comic joie de vivre.
The Tony for best drama went to “Leopoldstadt” and for best musical revival to “Parade.” Antisemitism animates both harrowing plays, which aim to reveal the cruelty and blindness of unquestioning bigotry. “Leopoldstadt” recreates a vivid portrait of the members of a cosmopolitan, assimilated Austrian Jewish family, most sent to the Nazi extermination camps during World War II because they were seen as members of an “alien race” polluting society. “Parade,” the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish Atlantan falsely convicted of murder, who is lynched by an angry antisemitic mob in 1915, echoes recent mobs of White Supremacists in the United States. The love of Leo and Lucille Frank forms the inspiring center of the play.
Like Kimberly, those facing infertility learn to smile at inevitable questions like: “Isn’t it time you had a baby?” Then they seize life with courage and optimism to become parents through adoption and assisted reproduction. And like the creators of “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade,” LGBTQ families confront bigotry with love and determination as they create families via sperm and egg donation and surrogacy.
I wish those who are dads today a Happy Father’s Day! And to those still working at it, I wish resolution and hope for next Father’s Day!