When the women in Daughtering come home, it’s not for a holiday or a funeral. They are summoned by something less polite and more urgent: The spirits in the house are restless, the urns are heavy with unfinished business and the living no longer know how to live with the dead or one another.
This uneasy homecoming drives the new play by Nina Alice Miller, marking its world premiere March 13–22 at the Carsen Theatre inside the Dairy Arts Center. Produced by Dirtyfish Theater and directed by Nicolette Vajtay, the play gathers three generations of women in an old family home over three emotionally charged days and nights.
“Daughters are consciences,” Miller says. “That’s why I chose to name the play Daughtering as opposed to Daughter, because being a daughter is an action. You are not a daughter unless you are doing daughtering.”
The daughters featured in Miller’s work include Olga, a European immigrant matriarch in her 70s. Her daughter Lisa, in her 50s. Lisa’s daughter Natalie, in her late 20s. And Mare, a 16-year-old trying to be a good daughter to a mother who has already died. Two urns containing family remains sit inside the house with them.
“The fifth character is the house; the sixth are the urns,” Miller says. “The urns reside in the house and the house holds the family history. The house is ensprited; I wouldn’t say it’s haunted, but it’s full of the spirits of the family, manifested in mice, which makes the house feel alive.”
Miller has been working on Daughtering for about four years. It originally began as a writing exercise built around monologues.
“It suddenly occurred to me that there were three generations of adults in my family and they were all daughters, acting like daughters in their own ways that were very generationally shaped,” she says. “From there, I started imagining monologues for all the daughters I knew.”
She wrote 20 of them before realizing a play was emerging. The emotional center became the unresolved relationship between Lisa and Natalie, the two middle generations who have been close, then distant, without ever fully addressing what happened between them.
“When the matriarch calls everyone home, everybody’s kind of caught off guard,” Miller says. “They don’t quite know how to navigate each other anymore. They had been close, but then things happened and they haven’t dealt with it.”
This isn’t a family in meltdown. There are no screaming matches worthy of daytime TV. Instead, the tension comes from what hasn’t been said and the years that have slipped by without tending to familial connections.
“They aren’t dysfunctional in the classic theater or television way,” Miller says. “They just haven’t put a lot of time into their relationships, so things can get a bit messy.”
Daughtering reached a major turning point last August with a staged reading at Aurora’s Vintage Theatre as part of its new-play development series. Miller credits that workshop — led by dramaturg Jen Clements and supported by Vintage’s Beth Foster — with helping her reshape the script from a collection of monologues into a more dynamic theatrical experience.
“The play took too long to get going,” Miller admits. “That was the residue of this thing starting as a whole bunch of monologues. I knew I needed to get to action faster and turn some of that into dialogue.”
Director Vajtay, who has known Miller since 2009, helped guide that evolution. Vajtay’s focus is on emotional truth, drawing from Uta Hagen’s approach to performance.
“If you don’t know my emotion toward this person, you can’t properly respond in a scene,” Vajtay says. “These people are family but really strangers. They haven’t seen each other in seven years. They left each other at a really painful moment when the father and daughter died.”
Actor Meg Chamberlain, who plays Lisa, remembers auditioning for the reading and immediately sensing the depth of the script.
“After I got to read the monologue, I was like, ‘Oh my god, there is so much here,’” she says. “I knew what great hands I’d be in from the way Nicolette worked with me to really find what was underneath all this beautiful writing.”
Now, in rehearsal for the full production, Vajtay is focused on what happens in the spaces between lines.
“As much dialogue as there is on the page, there is internal dialogue driving it,” she says. “That’s what I’m excited to explore in the rehearsal room.”
The production also marks a renewed chapter for Dirtyfish Theater, a collective of seven mid-career Colorado playwrights, including Miller, formed initially out of frustration with how little agency writers often have over their work.
“In the position of playwright, you don’t have a lot of control,” Miller says. “So a group of us said, ‘Why don’t we take things into our own hands?’”
Following an early DIY showcase in 2016 and a long pause, Daughtering became the project that brought Dirtyfish back to life. Rather than waiting for a regional theater slot or festival acceptance, Miller chose to self-produce.
“After last fall I said, ‘Why be passive?’ That’s a pathetic excuse for not making art,” Miller says. “I just got in touch with everybody, and the group agreed to support this play’s premiere.”
Finding an affordable venue made that possible. After surveying spaces around the metro area, Miller discovered availability at the Dairy Arts Center that fit the production’s budget.
“I think it’s a surprise to many people how affordable the Dairy is,” Miller says. “There are places I looked at that were well over double the price of what we paid at the Dairy. Because of the Dairy, it felt possible to do this without going broke.”
For Miller, that practicality connects to a larger philosophy about making theater in Colorado.
“I don’t really care about anything other than local productions,” she says. “Submitting to festivals around the country feels like screaming into the void. I want Denver’s theater scene to continue to thrive and be a beautiful community where people feel like they can produce incredible, world-class theater here.”
That emphasis on making work locally and collaboratively also shapes how Daughtering ultimately lands, favoring reflection over resolution. The audience, judging by the Vintage reading, leaves thinking not about plot mechanics but about their real lives.
“One thing that was beautifully encouraging was people left the theater talking about their families,” Miller says. “That’s lovely. That’s what you want to do in theater — start a conversation about how this relates to people’s real lives, and that’s what we are hoping to do.”
ON STAGE: Daughtering runs March 13-22 in the Carsen Theatre at the Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. $15-$37
