Barefoot in the Park and Mrs. Warren’s Profession, the two plays on this summer at North Rustico’s Watermark Theatre, both feature a mother-daughter relationship at their core, and Leah Pritchard and Gracie Finley will play daughter and mother in both plays. A unique situation that has both actresses thinking of their own mother-daughter relationships in their own lives.

Leah Pritchard: “When I think about what connects myself and the characters I will be playing this summer, I believe what we share the most is the stage at which we find ourselves in life. Vivie Warren, Corie Bratter, and I are all at an age where we are learning to establish ourselves as adult women in the world. And I think one of the most surprising and challenging aspects of that growth, is figuring out how you relate to your parents as an adult. In particular, how you relate to your mother as a woman. We’re trying to assert our independence, and prove that we are different from our mothers, all the while trying to understand who our mothers are as women. Personally, my mother is one of the most important people in my life, and I love how complex our relationship has always been. No one supports me like my mom, but I also don’t argue quite so frankly with anyone else. I am looking forward to seeing how the complexity of that mother-daughter dynamic lends itself to my understanding of my stage mama, Gracie Finley. Just like with my mother, I share such mutual respect and trust with Gracie, from our many summers playing mother and daughter on stage, that I know there will already be trust, and a loving familiarity between our characters this summer.”

Gracie Finley: “When tackling a mother-daughter relationship in a play, all those dimensions and layers from my personal life come into play and this can certainly help on many levels in establishing a believable relationship on the stage. It can also be a problem. Not all relationships are based on my own personal experience of trust and unconditional love and sometimes these instincts have to be fought if the play asks for something else. I have a very close relationship with my own daughter, though like all mother-daughter relationships we have our differences, and one of the toughest lessons for me to have learned is that my daughter is a very different person from me. I have had to learn to accept, support and ultimately respect that, unconditionally. This will be my 4th season working with Leah. We were the only two girls in the company during her first season when she played my adopted daughter in “The Lion In Winter”. We shared a dressing room and quickly found we were kindred spirits in many ways. I have seen her grow in confidence and ability as an actress, and mature and develop as a person. We have developed a trust and bond I know we can bring to the stage. She is a lovely girl and a dynamite actress. I am so proud of her on so many levels.”

Performances of “Barefoot in the Park” begin June 27th and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” gets going on July 7th.

The romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park ran for 1,530 performances when it first opened on Broadway in 1963making it Neil Simon’s longest running hit and one of the longest running non-musicals in Broadway history.

A free-spirited bride and her buttoned-down groom settle down to some rocky happily-ever-aftering in a New York City walk-up, occasionally invaded by the bride’s wacky mother and the quirky bohemian who lives in the attic. Made into a movie starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, Barefoot in the Park is clever and hilarious, filled with snappy dialogue and witty one-liners.