In Index to Idioms, the young son of a suburban woman comes home from school with a list of idioms from his English class. His Mother takes the list and decides that she will use her solitary moments and this list of idioms to tell the story of her life. As the idioms mount up, the landscape of the this mother's life is mapped – her suburban childhood, her coming to consciousness as a sexual and intellectual young woman, and of her discoveries of the body, in childbirth, in performance, in cleaning spit-up off her shirt, and in tango with a charismatic and moody mortality.
Index is a lyrical solo play that happens on the edge between fiction and memoir. It investigates parenthood from a feminine point of view, and is a love song to the body in pleasure, in illness, and in the profound and singular utility of Motherhood. The arc traced by the stories leaves the audience with a wide-angle view of a woman's life, with its tiny grandeurs and mysteries, its endurance of casual cruelty, and its sense of the beauty in common, daily experience.