Tender, Loving Care

Having just put her 6-year-old daughter to bed with a story, Kristine Thatcher finds herself on the phone telling another tale.

Most evenings, she would be taking advantage of this quiet time to slip into the office of her Chicago home to write. But she has agreed to talk to a reporter about one of her plays.

Closely based on her own experience, “Emma’s Child” tells of a couple who, after many frustrating years of trying to have a child of their own, are preparing to adopt a baby boy. When he is born with a severe--perhaps fatal--disability, they must decide whether to let go of him, or hold on. The play premiered in 1995 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is receiving its Southern California premiere as an International City Theatre production in Long Beach.

Thatcher speaks slowly at first, weighing her words during long pauses. She has always avoided telling too much of the real story, wanting to keep it to--and for--herself.

After a few evasion tactics, she decides to go for broke, however, and the details of her relationship with a baby boy named Corey come spilling out. He taught her an invaluable lesson--”that every life has value”--and she’s ready to share it.

After fertility treatments failed Thatcher and her actor husband, David Darlow, they signed up with an adoption agency. In May 1991, they were introduced to the pregnant young woman who had selected them to become the parents of her unborn baby boy.

When Corey was born in June of that year, however, he had hydrocephalus, better known as “water on the brain.” The liquid that bathed his brain could not drain properly, so it collected there, inflating his skull and damaging the tissue. Prospects for his survival were not good.

The adoption agency gently urged Thatcher to let go of Corey without meeting him. Another baby would come along. But Thatcher couldn’t do that. She insisted on meeting him.

“It was mother love at first sight,” she says. “I realized that, in spite of all his problems, there was this beautiful little soul, and I wanted to to be a part of that life. So I just sort of elbowed my way in.”

The birth mother lived about 50 miles from the Chicago hospital where her baby was being cared for. It was difficult for her to get there, and she had to go back to work to support her other child.

So, even though the adoption process had been put on hold, Thatcher began to visit the hospital every day to help the nurses care for Corey.

“I had had so many dreams for him and for myself. David and I had waited for years to have a child of our own, and I felt that, perhaps, he might be the only child I had a chance to mother--and I didn’t want to waste a minute.”

Thatcher saw past Corey’s problems to the brave, uncomplaining way in which he faced his monumental struggle to stay alive. Perhaps he would stabilize enough to leave the hospital; perhaps she and her husband would raise him--or, at least, be very involved in his life--after all.

Her husband, however, feared they were opening the door to more responsibility and pain than they could bear--and that, perhaps, Thatcher’s motherly ministrations were keeping the boy alive when he needed to let go.

“David was much more in touch with reality at that time,” she admits. “I think I was crazy with mother love. I couldn’t see what this would mean to our finances, or to our marriage, or to what our lives might be like seven or 10 years down the road. All I knew was I loved this baby; I wanted this child.”

Looking back at her time with Corey, she has no regrets.

“I think he happened to us for a reason, a really good reason. I had never seen a more courageous soul, a braver person, than that little child. He was a fighter. He taught me a lot about love and how to put one foot in front of the other. I think I was an all-thumbs mother when I first met him, and I was pretty adept when our relationship came to an end.”

Corey died after two months. About five months later, Thatcher and her husband were able to adopt a girl, Kerry--now the healthy, energetic 6-year-old asleep down the hall.

Thatcher, 47, began acting at 16 with a small professional company in her hometown, Lansing, Mich. She went on to work at regional theaters across the country and, in 1985, she met her future husband when she was cast opposite him in a production of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” at the Northlight Theatre in Chicago.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, she spent a lot of time with the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, where in addition to acting she tried her hand at directing. The artistic director offered her a chance to direct either a new play or a book of poetry by Lorine Niedecker, sometimes referred to as the Midwestern Emily Dickinson. Thatcher didn’t like the play but was fascinated by the poetry, and she found herself volunteering to write a show based on the poet’s life and work. The result was her first full-length play, “Niedecker.”

By the late 1980s, Thatcher had written a play called “Under Glass,” about a couple’s disappointments in not being able to have a child of their own--inspired by her own life. It was read as part of an Oregon Shakespeare new play festival. When the literary manager asked whether Thatcher had any other stories, the playwright said she’d been considering a play about Corey. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned her to write it.

Translating the story to the stage “really helped me work through what it was that happened to me,” Thatcher says, “helped me heal, helped me be a better parent for Kerry, and resolve this love I had for this little boy.”

“Emma’s Child” would go on to become of of three 1995 recipients of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, meant to encourage and develop women playwrights.

Among the subsequent productions of “Emma’s Child” was a 1996 staging at Chicago’s Victory Gardens, in which Thatcher’s husband played the character he had inspired. When the production was subsequently recorded for radio broadcast, Thatcher herself was pressed into playing her counterpart because, at the last minute, the original actress was unable to participate. The Southland eventually heard that program on KCRW.

Shashin Desai, artistic director at International City Theatre in Long Beach, said he wanted to present “Emma’s Child” because it is “very lyrical and very literate and absorbing, touching.”

He’s directing the show himself, and he’s anxious to head off any comparison to TV’s disease-of-the-week movies. “I think this is more a play about integrity and commitment--to marriage and parenthood,” he says. “The disease is not so predominant.

“Kristine’s persistent focus is on: Life matters, and the connections between lives matter.”

Thatcher agrees. “What’s a life worth? What did that child accomplish in his short life? He moved mountains, you know? He really opened people’s eyes to the joy of every moment--of being in the moment, living every moment. The measure of an individual is how far you’ll go before you quit.”

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“EMMA’S CHILD,” presented by International City Theatre, Long Beach City College, Clark Street and Harvey Way, Long Beach. Dates: Opens Friday at 8 p.m. and continues Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends June 14. Prices: $24 opening night; $22 regular performances. Phone: (562) 938-4128.