When Churchyards Yawn Study Guide

About the Production

The Ferryman’s Toll is a contemporary play that begins like a therapy session and gradually reveals itself as something much larger: a reckoning with trauma, memory loss, friendship, artistic collaboration, caregiving, identity, and betrayal.

At the center of the story are Alexandra and Marguerite, two women with more than fifty years of shared history. They are not romantic partners, but their bond is more intimate, more complex, and in many ways more enduring than many marriages. Together they built a theatre company, held each other’s histories, survived devastating childhood trauma, and created a language of humor, shorthand, and deep mutual reliance.

As the play unfolds, therapy becomes less about surface conflict and more about what has been carried for decades without full expression. Dementia, trauma responses, dissociation, rage, tenderness, queer intimacy, artistic labor, and the ethics of witnessing all converge inside a structure that is at once painful, hilarious, and startlingly alive.

Core idea: This production asks what it means to love someone through memory, through damage, through change, and through the terrifying possibility of being forgotten.

Big Ideas to Listen For

What does it mean to “hold” someone else’s story?

Alexandra and Marguerite have spent a lifetime carrying one another’s trauma. The play asks whether that kind of holding heals, burdens, protects, or all three.

What happens when memory becomes unreliable?

Dementia, trauma, dissociation, and selective recall shape the play’s structure and emotional stakes. Memory is both evidence and unstable ground.

How do trauma responses collide?

One person fights, one flees. One needs intensity, one shuts down. The play shows how two wounded survival systems can keep retraumatizing each other while still loving each other deeply.

What is the toll for crossing?

The Ferryman and River Styx imagery turns memory into a kind of currency. The play asks what must be carried, confessed, or surrendered before someone can move on.

What kind of relationship is this?

The play resists easy labels. Alexandra and Marguerite are bound by theatre, history, shared damage, caregiving, laughter, and devotion that exceeds ordinary categories.

How does humor function here?

The script is often very funny. That humor does not weaken the pain; it becomes one of the ways the characters survive and keep contact with one another.

Context and Background

The play takes place largely through Zoom therapy sessions, a setting that immediately raises questions about mediation, performance, intimacy, and observation. Therapy here is not a neat path toward healing. It is also a stage, a confessional, a battleground, a place of revelation, and occasionally a place of exploitation.

Both Alexandra and Marguerite are survivors of profound childhood sexual violence. Their adult identities, conflict styles, emotional reflexes, and relationship patterns are shaped by those early experiences. The play refuses to simplify trauma into one symptom or one recovery model. Instead, it shows how trauma can alter memory, language, bodily responses, trust, conflict, attachment, and selfhood over decades.

The script also centers aging and illness, especially dementia and Parkinsonian symptoms, without stripping Marguerite of humor, intelligence, artistry, or force. At the same time, Alexandra’s dissociative structure reveals a different survival strategy: personas, alters, and improvisational departures created to endure what was otherwise unbearable.

Why this matters now

The play speaks to trauma-informed care, caregiving, neurodivergence, dementia, queer chosen family, and the emotional realities of collaborative artistic work.

Why the theatre company matters

Alexandra and Marguerite did not only survive together. They made art together. The company becomes proof of what they built, and of what is at risk as illness changes the terms of partnership.

This play is not just about what happened. It is about what was carried, what was misremembered, what was never said, and what must finally be spoken before time runs out.

Synopsis

The play opens with Dr. Clark preparing for what he assumes will be a fairly ordinary couples-style session between Alexandra and Marguerite, longtime friends and artistic collaborators. Almost immediately, the session complicates his assumptions. The women are hilarious, intimate, irritable, theatrical, and profoundly bonded, but they are not a couple in the usual sense. Their conflict seems at first to revolve around theatre work, communication, and Marguerite’s growing cognitive difficulties.

As the conversation deepens, dementia, Parkinsonian symptoms, trauma memory, dissociation, and survival responses begin to surface. Alexandra and Marguerite both reveal histories of childhood sexual abuse, and it becomes clear that their decades-long friendship includes a mutual pact: each woman carries hatred on behalf of the other, so the other does not have to carry it alone.

Private therapy sessions with each woman reveal further layers. Alexandra discloses dissociative identities that have helped her survive, function, perform, protect herself, and navigate danger. Marguerite reveals fear, rage, cognitive decline, shame, and a terrible truth she has not been able to tell Alexandra. Their conflict is not only about illness; it is about being witnessed, remembered, and not abandoned.

In the final movement of the play, after Alexandra helps Marguerite in a concrete and loving way, Marguerite finally says the thing she has been trying to say: Alexandra’s adored older brother Adam was one of the boys who assaulted her. The revelation reorganizes their history and clarifies much that had remained unresolved. The ending does not “fix” the pain, but it does reassign its burden. Alexandra vows to hate him on Marguerite’s behalf for as long as necessary, even beyond memory itself.

Key Characters

Alexandra

Brilliant, funny, conflict-avoidant, deeply loving, and trauma-shaped. She survives through dissociation, personas, humor, caretaking, and work.

Marguerite (Rita)

Fierce, explosive, vulnerable, artistic, and increasingly affected by dementia and Parkinsonian symptoms. She is a massive force of nature and a person terrified of vanishing.

Dr. Clark

The therapist whose role shifts over the course of the play. Sometimes perceptive, sometimes obtuse, sometimes ethically compromised, he becomes part of the story rather than a neutral observer.

Cornelius

One of Alexandra’s alters: seven years old, funny, disarming, and used to de-escalate danger. He is not a joke figure, but part of a sophisticated survival system.

The Mother Figure / Uncle Bob / Other Alters

Personas Alexandra uses to navigate different kinds of danger, labor, gendered expectations, and emotional need.

Adam

Mostly absent until the final revelation, but central to the emotional architecture of the play. He embodies the destructive power of adored, protected family myths.

Themes and Big Ideas

Trauma and Memory

Trauma in this play is not a backstory detail. It shapes everything: what is remembered, what is forgotten, what is misheard, what feels dangerous, and what the body does before the mind can catch up.

Witnessing and Carrying

Alexandra and Marguerite carry each other’s pain across decades. The play asks whether shared bearing is a form of love, a survival tactic, a burden, or all at once.

Dementia, Decline, and Identity

Marguerite’s cognitive changes raise questions about authorship, leadership, dignity, memory, and what remains when sharpness and recall begin to fragment.

Dissociation and Survival

Alexandra’s alters are not treated as spectacle. They are living strategies of survival, protection, improvisation, and function.

Chosen Family and Unclassifiable Love

The relationship between Alexandra and Marguerite exceeds easy labels. It is a study in long-term devotion, irritation, dependency, artistry, and care.

Humor as Contact

Much of the play’s humor functions as intimacy. Jokes become a way to stay connected in unbearable emotional territory.

The Ferryman’s Toll

The Styx imagery turns memory into passage currency. What must be remembered, confessed, or relinquished in order to cross? What happens when memory itself starts disappearing before the crossing?

The Ethics of Listening

Again and again, the play returns to hearing versus actually listening. To hear late is not the same as hearing in time. That difference becomes one of the central wounds in the relationship.

Vocabulary

Dissociation: A disruption in memory, identity, perception, or awareness that can function as a trauma response.
DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder): A condition involving distinct identity states or alters, often associated with severe trauma.
Sundowning: Increased confusion, agitation, or disorientation later in the day, often associated with dementia.
Trauma response: A body-and-mind survival pattern such as fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or dissociation.
Gaslighting: A form of manipulation that causes someone to doubt their perception or sanity; the play also explores how something can feel like gaslighting without intentional manipulation.
Perseveration: Repetition or fixation, often associated with cognitive or neurological struggle.
Chosen family: A support network formed by deep commitment rather than blood relation.
River Styx: In Greek mythology, the river separating the world of the living from the dead, crossed with the help of the ferryman.

Engage With the Production

Before You Experience the Production

What does it mean to truly listen to another person?
How can two people love each other deeply and still keep hurting each other?
What responsibilities come with carrying someone else’s story?
How do trauma and illness affect memory, conflict, and trust?
What kinds of relationships does our culture recognize easily, and which ones are harder to name?

During the Experience

Notice how humor and pain operate at the same time.
Pay attention to moments when Alexandra and Marguerite are deeply in sync, even inside conflict.
Listen for the difference between what is said, what is avoided, and what is remembered too late.
Consider how dementia and trauma affect the shape of the conversation.
Notice how Alexandra’s alters shift the emotional temperature of the scene.
Listen for river and ferryman imagery as a framework for memory, crossing, and loss.
Pay attention to how Dr. Clark changes as the story deepens.

After You Experience the Production

How would you describe Alexandra and Marguerite’s relationship?
What does the play suggest about the difference between hearing and truly listening?
How did the use of alters affect your understanding of Alexandra?
What does Marguerite most need from Alexandra by the end of the play?
How does the Adam revelation change everything that came before it?
Did the ending feel like release, grief, reallocation of burden, or something else?
What stayed with you most strongly: a joke, an image, a confession, a silence, or a shift in tone?

Activities and Writing Prompts

Quick Reflection

Write for five minutes about one moment when humor and pain were present at the same time. Why was that moment so powerful?

Relationship Study

Create a map of Alexandra and Marguerite’s relationship using key words: trust, anger, witnessing, memory, artistry, obligation, tenderness, resentment, loyalty, fear. Then discuss which words matter most and why.

Discussion Activity

Discuss the statement: Sometimes the deepest love in a play is not romantic, but it is still life-defining.

Memory and Toll

The play suggests that memory may be part of the toll for crossing. What memories do the characters most need to keep, and which do they most need to release?

Creative Writing Prompt

Write a short monologue from the perspective of the Ferryman listening to Alexandra and Marguerite. What do you think he believes they are trying to carry across?

Performance Activity

Explore a short scene twice: once playing only the words, and once emphasizing the subtext of what is not being said. Reflect on how silence, interruption, and emotional history shape meaning.