River View Observer – Page 2

on the cover . . .By Sally Deering

“Girl/Group: A Daughter’s Tale” a personal piece about her mother’s life as a doo-whop singer and the affect it has had on Murphy’s life. (“Girl/Group: A Daughter’s Tale” features Murphy along with Tom Cappadona, Drew Citron, Alison Scaramella, and Jenna Smith and is directed by Mario Giacalone. It opens at LaMama’s The Club in New York City on June 17 and runs through June 26.) Murphy describes the piece as “a performance memoir about doo-wop and dreams deferred. It’s a play with music about mothers and daughters, uncelebrated lives and the extraordinary talents that lie hidden within them.” The main character played by Murphy is a singer who goes back 50 years to her mother’s life as a member of a successful girl group. Murphy calls the piece an “Alice-through-the-looking-glass” adventure where the

singer reclaims her mother’s legacy and, in doing so, creates one of her own. “When I was 15, I started writing my own material,” Murphy says, “and somehow I knew I was going to come to this story at some point in my life.” Murphy’s full-length play about her mother’s experience as a doo-wop singer began 20 years ago, she says, when she was invited to perform a 10-minute monologue on her story of choice and she chose to talk about her mother’s singing career. Ten years later, she started thinking of that monologue and the play began to take shape. “I always had my mother’s records and they were always fascinating to me,” Murphy says. “It was family history and even more, it was my voice that I heard on those records. When I would research songs for the kind of

music that I perform, I always came back around to my mother’s music and that’s when I decided that I needed to tell this story. And the more I worked on this play, the more I began to think about all the other uncelebrated people in this world. We live in an ‘American Idol’ society and there are people sitting behind desks, teaching school, who have amazing gifts and you just don’t know about them. That’s become very interesting to me.” Growing up, Murphy wanted to be a rock star, she says. And because of her experience as an undergrad in the experimental theater division of NYU’S Tisch School of the Arts, Murphy’s career path turned into a search for belonging that included singing in New York’s cabaret rooms like the Eighty Eights and doing theater and music gigs that didn’t fit one particular genre. “I was never a cabaret

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