Just a girl, standing in front of her mum, asking not to spend Y2K in an apocalypse bunker.
A nostalgic journey through the era of Britney Spears, cellphones that looked like small bricks and jeans that only look good on a person with the lower torso of a 12 year old boy, Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato is a tale of past demons, future hopes, and the universal struggle of the family we need versus the family we get.
It’s December 1999, and the one thing helping 17-year-old Rachel avoid the fact she’s terrified about her future is the promise of ringing in the year 2000 on a beach with her friends/love interest. So when her mother insists she greet Y2K in an apocalypse bunker her father’s built in their front garden, Rachel seeks counsel from the only rational adult she can think of, beloved children’s entertainer Suzy Cato.
This darkly goofy one-woman show is written and performed by Kiwi/elder millennial Florence Hartigan, who when she’s not fretting about the apocalypse, can be seen acting alongside Rachel Griffiths in the TV comedy ‘Madam’, which was awarded Best New Creation at the 2024 Monte-Carlo Television Festival, and Best Comedy at the 2024 Berlin International Television Festival. Madam has garnered glowing reviews in New Zealand, and is coming soon to Australia. Florence also starred in the US feature film Phoenix Forgotten, which was produced by Ridley Scott and the animated horror film To Your Last Death, alongside William Shatner.
The inspiration to make Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato came from Florence’s experience of navigating the strange contradictions of being a girl in the late 90s/early 2000s, where the future promised seemed both exciting and potentially lethal. It was the new millennium, but also potentially the end of the world. The message was “Go girl!” but the subtext was much different.
“My school once had an assembly just for the girls to tell us we were all dressing too provocatively and it was distracting the boys and making them unable to learn – but we were never told what was and wasn’t too “provocative.” I think that’s what it felt like in the late 90s – as a young woman, and I imagine as a mother, you were always trying to get things “right” – but what exactly that meant felt like it was always moving.”
In a time where we need connection more than ever, Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato offers a chance to share, commiserate, laugh and look back fondly on an era that shaped/damaged/grew a generation. As the Y2K era comes back with a vengeance in today’s pop culture the play invites the audience into a world which is simultaneously nostalgic and current. It creates a space where we can come together and find a piece of ourselves reflected back to us – and be thoroughly entertained in the process.
October 16 – 20
