I have an invitation for you. Something that will make you laugh a lot, I promise.
But first a story.
I found true love for the first time in my 50s. The real thing. Right here, in the Berkshires.
“We can’t be in love” I said to Bhima one day.
“Why not?”
“There’s no friction. We don’t have to negotiate.”
“I know,” he said. “Isn’t it great?”
Before I met Bhima, I met a nice, tidy man who was happy to cook and clean the kitchen while I did stand-up comedy in Hollywood. So, I married him.
Then our children were born, and I knew we couldn’t raise them in Los Angeles. To quote my fellow Comedy Store comedian Argus Hamilton, “The LA philosophy? ‘I may not be much, but I’m all I ever think about.’”
So we made a mistake and we moved to New Jersey.
A few years later, we divorced, amicably enough, and I headed to the Berkshires with our two children to raise them in voluntary rural exile.
Flip forward 10 years: My kids are in college and, homesick for England, I set up my own audiobook company, Alison Larkin Presents, and start narrating the English classics.
Elizabeth has Darcy, Jane Eyre has Rochester. But what about me? I suddenly realized I would never find true love if I didn’t do something about it before it was too late.
Then one day, when I popped into the Red Lion Inn to get a Sunday New York Times, I met Bhima, who, like me, had come to America 30 years before. He came from India to earn a PhD in Chemical Engineering. I came from England to find my all-American birth parents. That is another story of course. But I digress. Which, by the way, is genetic.
We hiked up Monument Mountain and Mount Greylock, drank coffee at No. Six Depot and Stockbridge Coffee and Tea, bought wine and ginger chews at Nejaimes, went to plays at Shakespeare and Company, and saw John Williams conduct his greatest work at Tanglewood. We floated on our backs in the Stockbridge Bowl and listened to jazz at The Tunnel in Bennington. We ate noodles at Blue Mango in Williamstown and far too much of that delicious vegan orange cake you get at Guidos, the one that is so soft you can’t eat just one slice, you really can’t.
We fell in love. It was like wearing a shoe that is too tight for your entire life, then finally taking it off.
At the end of July 2020, we decided to marry. We would spend time with my family in England and his family in India and California. We would write a book together about climate change—at least one—and we would create a welcoming home in the Berkshire Hills that the people we loved would come to, often.
Then, five days later, he died.
Then something even more surprising happened. A few weeks after Bhima died, when the numbness thawed, instead of despair, I felt an extra energy and a kind of deep joy. And I was acutely aware of everything—including the fact that people all over the world were losing loved ones. Some of them in far worse ways.
I kept thinking about something South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu told me when we met several years before. “I can’t control what happens to me,” he said, “but I can control how I respond to it.”
A friend encouraged me to write and tell him what happened, so I did. Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote back right away and insisted I write a new comedy show because, he said, “It will bring hope to a world that badly needs it.”
So I did.
It is one thing to write a show and quite another to get it produced. But I live in a magical place, and despite some initial reluctance on my part, the sensitive and ferociously talented Jim Frangione convinced me to perform an early version of the show, then called “Grief, the Musical,” at the Great Barrington Public Theater in June 2022, directed by my great friend James Warwick.
Over the next year, I ran through the mountains and past the rivers and lakes where Bhima and I had walked.
Then the Soho Theatre, London’s top comedy venue, invited me to perform a new incarnation of the show, now called “Alison Larkin: Grief… A Comedy,” in London in November 2023.
It sold out. People of all different backgrounds, some of whom had also lost loved ones, came from all over the country and gathered with me in the bar afterwards to share stories and laugh and cry together. For real. In person.
The Soho Theatre then announced that they were going to produce “Alison Larkin: Grief… A Comedy” at the Edinburgh Fringe, followed by a 30-theatre U.K. tour, then a world tour.
Will I be performing the show again in the U.S.? Yes. In 2025.
But first, before the world tour, we are performing five previews of “Alison Larkin: Grief… a Comedy” at the fabulous Barrington Stage in Pittsfield from June 6-9!
How do Grief and Comedy go together? Please come to Barrington Stage and find out. Purchase tickets here.
P.S.: There was so much more to this story, I realized I would just have to write a book if I wanted to tell the rest. So I did. It’s also called “Grief… A Comedy,” and it tells the story of what happened next, beginning a few weeks after Bhima died, when he showed up at my kitchen table determined to help me find love again. A limited exclusive advance edition of “Grief… A Comedy” (the book) is available for purchase only by audience members immediately after a live show. So the very first readers will be people who have come to see the show at Barrington Stage. Please come. And then please reach out to me via my website and let me know what you think.
