urban excavations

And Her Children (A Reimagining of Mother Courage)
Featuring Hailey McAfee and Julia Hoffman (violinist)
SoHo Playhouse
January 14, 2026 – February 13, 2026

In the 1995 movie The American President, a final press conference by the fictional president Andrew Shepherd features a resonant refrain about gun control policy that he has skirted around for the entire film, managing humor and romance and serious political gamesmanship (e.g. we’ll do guns AFTER we tackle another issue when we have the votes lined up). Then there is a final moment, when policy and politics hit his personal life (not with violence but with scurrilous allegations against his paramour). He is ready to take on the guns.

“You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and hand guns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns.”

But what if your job is to defend gun ownership? The question of guns and schools and safety everywhere is tackled in The Attic Collective’s and her Children, a quirky adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage, in which a mother defends the availability of guns in the face of a senseless tragedy. This almost one person show (there’s a musician who appears and with whom the main character interacts), Anna Fierling (Hailey McAfee) takes on that challenge, with devasting results.

Anna sits before a community group as an NRP representative who reveals a tragic personal story — the mass shooting that has inspired the meeting we are all now attending was perpetrated by her own son, who also shot and killed his twin sister, and that a third child had died by suicide some time before. These revelations land like hot coals, searing our skin, powerful, disturbing, perplexing to an audience member attempting to understand the motivations of the person before them, defending the “right to bear arms” in the face of their own horrific personal connection to America’s violent gun epidemic.

Music provided by violinist Julia Hoffman throughout the show punctuates the proceedings as discordant off-stage chords that disrupt Anna’s train of thought and the question is planted: are these sound effects that the community meeting can hear or are we in Anna’s head? Ultimately violinist Hoffman joins Anna on stage to play a haunting lullaby.

In the course of the show, we move from monologue and fugue dream stages in which Anna delivers her lines (lit with precision by Russell Chow) to a more formal podium setting complete with American flag that reads as press conference.

McAffee, both main performer and co-writer of this piece, is compelling as Anna: sympathetic as a single working mom committed to her cause, yet the nature of her cause is tone-deaf and destructive. We learn by play’s end that we can’t rely on the Anna’s of the world to change their tune, but we must look to each other and find the real-life Andrew Shepherds to take up the cause to effect lasting gun control system change.

© Martha Wade Steketee (January 30, 2026)

Playwright | Rosie Glen-Lambert and Hailey McAfee
Director | Rosie Glen-Lambert
Set Design | Raphael Mishler
Costume Design | Mallory McAfee
Lighting Design | Russell Chow
Sound Design | Padra Crisafulli
Composition | Padra Crisafulli