Vanessa and Janie are best friends… until a devastating diagnosis forces them to consider what that friendship means and how much it matters. Vanessa is sick, and she’s getting sicker, while Janie is embarking on a new love affair. As Janie tries to balance her role as a caretaker with her dreams for her own future, the cracks in the friendship begin to emerge. An exploration of aging, mortality, and the value and complexity of female friendship in a patriarchal society.

Lia Romeo is a 2021-2022 fellow in the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard. Her play The Forest was developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and was scheduled to receive a National New Play Network rolling world premiere this season (postponed due to the coronavirus). Her play Sitting and Talking, starring Dan Lauria and Wendie Malick, premiered at Mile Square Theatre and has subsequently been presented by Laguna Playhouse, New Jersey Rep, Seven Devils New Play Foundry, and other companies. Other plays have been produced off-Broadway at 59E59 and regionally around the country, and four of her plays have been recognized by the Kilroys List. She was the winner of City Theatre’s National Short Playwriting Award, and has been a nominee or a finalist for the Heideman Award, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Kesselring Prize, and the Steinberg Award. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Dramatists Play Service, and Smith & Kraus. She is the associate artistic director with Project Y Theatre Company, and she teaches playwriting at Primary Stages/ESPA and in the M.A. program in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She earned her B.A. from Princeton and her M.F.A. in playwriting from Rutgers/MGSA.