No matter how old — or young — you are, there is one life event you will face as surely as that death and taxes thing: at some point you will need to care for an infirm parent or relative, or make arrangements to have them cared for.
It happened to Breeda Kelly Miller, when her aging mother Mary Kelly became too feeble to live on her own. Without hesitation, after consulting with her husband James, she moved her mother into their home with their three children, where Mary lived for six years before passing away in 2011 at the age of 86.
Miller calls herself “an accidental caregiver.” “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she recalls. “I had no training, no medical background. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had become a member of the ‘Sandwich Generation,’ caring for a parent at the same time I was caring for my kids. All I knew was, I loved my mother, she was beginning to show signs of dementia, and I knew she couldn’t live on her own any longer.”
Miller wasn’t prepared for the feelings of exhaustion, isolation, and frustration that come with full-time caregiving, nor the guilt she experienced whenever she did things for herself. Now, years later, she has turned that stress into success as an actor and first-time playwright. The Lincoln Park native returns Downriver Sunday night to present her award-winning, one-woman production Mrs. Kelly’s Journey Home at 7 p.m. at the Trenton Village Theater, with all proceeds going to benefit the Grosse Ile Historical Society.
Miller is no stranger to the stage. At 17 she won an acting scholarship to Michigan State University, “but I didn’t think I was willing to pay the price to go to New York or L.A.,” she remembers. “So I transferred to the University of Detroit and majored in radio and television.” Even so, it’s fair to say writing a 90-minute, two-act play wasn’t prominent on Miller’s bucket list.
“Never crossed my mind,” Miller says. “I tell people that writing a play for the first time was not unlike my caregiving experience: I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I knew I needed to find help.”
Help came in the form of Brian Cox, the noted Ann Arbor area playwright and director. A mutual friend suggested the two should meet, and Cox invited Miller to take part in one of the storytelling events he produces in Washtenaw County. Using one of the myriad photos she had placed into an album to help spur her mother’s memory as a backdrop, she told a 10-minute story about Mary Miller’s last days that resonated with the audience, featured nationally on The Moth Story Hour on NPR.
Sometime later, as Cox recalls it, he and Miller were sitting on her front porch going over the photo album. Every picture told a story, and Miller was regaling him with the tales each image inspired. Finally he turned to her and said, “I have three words for you.”
She feared those words were, “Please shut up.”
Instead, he suggested, “One woman show.”
It was a no-brainer, Cox says, “because she has the three key components. She has the photographs, which I believe are visually riveting. She has the personality, the chops, to hold an audience for 90 minutes. Few people do; she does. And she has the stories, and they are great stories. What’s more, she has a fourth element, very unexpected: her mother. Her mother is such a powerful presence that I really believe, even though I’m closely connected with the show, that by the end you come away loving Mary Kelly. You think, ‘I really would have liked that woman.’”
Mrs. Kelly’s Journey Home went through 10 rewrites — that’s not a misprint — before it premiered in October 2021 at the Arthur Miller Theatre on the University of Michigan campus. The play is equal parts heartwarming, heartbreaking, and hilarious. As one critic wrote of that opening night, “Mrs. Kelly’s Journey Home, as brilliantly depicted by Breeda Kelly Miller…is everything you could hope for: funny, touching, emotional, poignant and absolutely riveting.”
With no costume changes, only vocal inflections and shifts in posture, Miller portrays four characters onstage: her mother (with a lilting Irish accent); her father Tom; Mary’s beloved U.S. neighbor, Virginia Wilson, and herself. The first act depicts Mary’s reluctant relocation from her native Ireland to America, when Tom decided to move his family and she had no say in the matter.
The second act recalls her slow but steady mental decline, where she insists she has two daughters: the “Good Breeda” — who was supposed to be named Brenda before she got creative, the play reveals — and “Bad Breeda.” The production won the 2021-22 Wilde Award from EncoreMichigan for Best One-Person Show.
Miller, who also has become a nationally recognized speaker on the subject of caregiving and the author of two books on the subject, Take a Break Before You Break: 52 Practical Self-Care Tips, and The Caregiver Coffeebreak, reckons she has performed Mrs. Kelly’s Journey Home 15 times leading up to Sunday’s Trenton staging. It’s the first stop on what she’s jokingly calling “the tour:” through word of mouth and her own pleasant persistence she has booked upcoming shows in Vero Beach and Tampa, Fla., Chicago in March in advance of St. Patrick’s Day, and Duluth, Ga., near Atlanta.
(She’s also taking the show to Ireland Sept. 20-29 part of a group tour trip she’s organizing to the Emerald Isle. See breedamiller.com for details.)
“I’m doing all the bookings myself,” she says. “When people say, ‘We want you to come,’ I say to them, ‘We need two things: we need a theater, and we need a local nonprofit organization to partner with and receive the proceeds. Because I’m not famous, the play’s not famous, but people will come out for something that’s supporting an organization they know and love. So that’s how I’m breaking the ice.”
Now 64, Miller says she can’t imagine the show ever becoming boring or perfunctory from her standpoint.
“Oh, God, no,” she says. “In fact, it’s gotten so much better. Because instead of worrying about my memory or the script or the stage directions, I am now so comfortable with the text and the pacing and where the laughs are that I just have so much fun. And the audience reaction show after show, it just lights me up.”
She plans to celebrate Mrs. Kelly’s journey home as long as she’s able. “It’s not like I’m going to age out of the role, right?” she says with a laugh. “Another side benefit is that I realized I needed to have the mental and physical stamina to do this. So in the past six months I have lost 45 pounds and I walk religiously at least three miles every day. The beauty of it is as I’m walking, I’m running over all my lines because I need to study anyway. So it’s a win-win.
“And when I’m sitting backstage waiting to go on, all by my lonesome, I take that time and I just summon my mom and dad to be with me,” Miller says. “And I know that they are present with me on the stage. They’re delighted, and they won’t let me fail. So it’s a ‘one woman show’ technically, but they’re up there.”
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