Larken Link

GOIN’ UP HOME, a play by Scout Larken Link, explores both cherished family history and contentious familial relationships. This highly literary story, set in the present with flashbacks to the distant past, is told in two acts. Characters in this family have close generational ties, like many families in the American south, but as is also often the case, not all those ties are pleasant.

This published edition includes a family tree of this ficticious group of relatives.

The play premiered in 2022 at the Kentucky Center for the Arts, directed by Gilmer McCormick and produced by Eve Theatre Company.

Main characters Liz and Emily are double-first-cousins who have returned to their Mamaw’s farmhouse in rural Kentucky, not far from the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It has been several years since the old woman died. The cousins, both of whom live nearby, have come to clean the homeplace one last time ... and to host a gathering of extended family members. Memories of Mamaw are essential to the story, but other family issues arise, as well. In addition, there’s a notion that some type of ＂genetic memory＂ or ineffable psychic tendency runs through the generations of women of the family. In fact, Hallie (Liz’s teenage niece) learns that she, too, may indeed have a touch of this curious characteristic. Her encounter with a long forgotten one-hundred-year-old family story, the details of which are sketchy until Hallie gets involved, arise from within the emotion of the situation.

There are aunts and uncles and cousins galore ... and then there’s the family’s ＂bad seed.＂ When Gary shows up unannounced and uninvited, bringing his grievances, hatred and anger with him, the gathering becomes explosive.