How We Crashed The Car

In How We Crashed The Car And Had Our Kids, Deena and Becky are nearly nine months pregnant in the rural Tennessee summer. Both are having trouble with their marriages, the August heat and the lack of alcohol. Deena’s in her 40’s and this will be her fourth child. Her husband is a Vietnam Vet haunted by violence and drawn to the woods. Her marriage is cracking under the strain and so is her pregnancy. Becky is finally pregnant after five years of marriage, but her husband Ronny may be having an affair with Deena’s teenage daughter.

When a car accident leaves Becky in labor and dying by the side of a deserted country road, Deena, who is carrying a stillborn, delivers Becky’s baby against all odds, goes into emotional shock and disappears with the infant. Or did Deena kill Becky with her bare hands, rip the baby right out of her and steal it for her own.

How do we, with our reasonable minds in our reasonable lives, come to an understanding of something as deep and inborn as birth and motherhood? How do we judge the instinct to preserve life at all costs? How We Crashed The Car And Had Our Kids is a play about the conflict between instinct and reason and how we maintain our humanity in the grip of our most basic and primordial urges.