“Grief… A Comedy”: Alison Larkin Brings Celebrated Show Home to the Mahaiwe for TV Shoot

Join the filming audience for a Berkshires love story with many chapters.

Alison Larkin's one-woman show “Grief...A Comedy” comes to the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington June 12 and 13 for a special performance, filmed for television. It is, depending on how you look at it, a comedy, a love story, a eulogy, and a homecoming for a show born in the Berkshires. It’s here she found love again, lost it in an instant, and got back on the hunt with the help of her fiance’s ghost. 

Talking to Larkin, from her Great Barrington home and recording studio, is like listening to someone casually play multiple instruments at once. In the course of a single sentence she can slip from a crisp English accent into a Tennessee drawl, from comedy into something that catches you off guard with its weight, and then back again. Her story is bizarrely dynamic. Each chapter heightened by coincidence and seemingly tormented by a form of tragic luck. Don’t believe me? Here’s the story:

Chapter 1

Larkin was born in Washington, DC, and adopted by English parents, raised in England and East and West Africa. She trained as a classical actress at the Weber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, wrote plays but says she figured the best playwrights had been actors first. Then, in her mid-20s, she found her birth mother—in Tennessee—and her birth father in Washington, DC, and moved to New York to do stand-up comedy. She became a rrecognizable face at the Comedy Cellar, working with every major comedian you could name. Then she did the same in Los Angeles, becoming a regular at the Comedy Store.

"With my English accent," Larkin remembers, "I'd say: 'I'm Alison Larkin and I come from out in Tennessee.' And everybody would just crack up, thinking it was a joke." When audiences realized it wasn't, they wanted to know everything. So she wrote her first one-woman show, playing herself, her English adoptive mother, and her American birth mother, which became the autobiographical novel The English American, a Simon and Schuster bestseller that, along the way, helped change laws in America governing adoptees' access to their own birth certificates.

Chapter 2

The Berkshires entered Larkin’s life at 45, after a Hollywood career that had been on the verge of a sitcom, after a marriage that ended when her husband, as she puts it, turned out to be "very bad at maths." She was looking for somewhere with nature, a creative community, somewhere her two young kids would thrive. Someone on Facebook suggested the Berkshires.

"Everybody said, ‘Whatever you do, don't go up in February,’" she recalls. "So I drove up in February in a snowstorm. And I thought, oh my god, this is it." Her kids, seven and nine at the time, are now 23 and 25. She became a year-rounder, living in Stockbridge, where she also set up Alison Larkin Presents, an audiobook company that has produced over 250 titles. Her narration of Jane Austen's complete works, recorded at Audiobook Cottage in Stockbridge, has become the best-selling Austen audiobook in existence.

Chapter 3

Larkin met Bhima Nitta at the Red Lion Inn. She had avoided love for most of her life, a pattern, she says, common among adopted people. "We’re so afraid of getting it and losing it." She was in her 50s. What followed was, by her account, a once-in-a-lifetime romance. Then five days after Bhima asked her to marry him, he died suddenly.

"Instead of wanting to give up and hide under the bed and never come out," she says, "I'm finding that I actually want to live and love more fully than ever."

If a story like this our protagonist would now stumble into some sage advice from a wizened advisor from out of nowhere. 

It was Archbishop Desmond Tutu—whom she had met in 2005 at a dinner in New York, won over with a Margaret Thatcher impression—who told her, when she wrote to him after Bhima died, that she absolutely had to go back to the stage and tell this story. "It's going to bring hope to so many people," Tutu told her. She told him she couldn't bear to write another book. "So just tell jokes, write songs, whatever," he said. "But tell it." She says you really couldn't say no to him.

What she made is “Grief... A Comedy” — which, she is at pains to point out, is not about grief at all really. "It's a love story," she says. "People leave feeling so much better than when they came in." The show premiered at Great Barrington Public Theater, went to Barrington Stage, then the Soho Theatre in London, then the Edinburgh Fringe, where reviewers called it "outstandingly uplifting."

Now it's coming back to the Mahaiwe where it will be filmed before a live audience as a television special, directed by Scott Floyd Lochmus, whose credits include “Barbra Streisand: Back to Brooklyn” and multiple Celine Dion specials. It will likely air in 2027. It will be the first broadcast of its kind filmed at the Mahaiwe.

Larkin told me she wanted as many local crew as possible because a Berkshires story deserves a Berkshires production. She wants the house full, because the audience is part of what gets filmed and part of what gets felt.

"We're hoping we'll sell out!" she says. "Let us pray."

And with the filming another chapter in the life of Alison Larkin begins. 

“Grief... A Comedy” plays the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, 14 Castle Street, Great Barrington, June 12 at 7pm and June 13 at 2pm. Tickets at mahaiwe.org.