Dear Editor:

An extraordinary thing happened at the Lincoln Theater Friday night. An almost sold-out crowd watched local resident Frances Mercanti-Anthony take to the stage to perform her one-woman show, Frances Floats, and lives were changed.

Mercanti-Anthony moved to the area in 2018 from New York City, where she had a twenty-year career on Broadway, as well as a search for a life partner and an ill-gotten relationship with the scale. Oh, the travails we bring upon ourselves.

She met her husband while teaching at a camp for the summer, and six years later, she is happily married with three children she adores and a perspective on so many things that everyone in her audience is seeking to find.

It’s so funny, poignant, brilliantly written, and delivered—sometimes painful to watch and listen to—that you marvel at her ability to take you down a road of difficult self-reflection and then bring you back to a table of joy and self-deprecating understanding of our own fallibility. In one hour. When she received a standing ovation before she had even finished her show, it was an applause of gratitude.

I had the good fortune to meet Frances before the play. She is the Audible reader of a novel I wrote, Flight of the Starling. She sent me her play a few months ago for my comments, and I knew it was special when I read it. But what was on the stage last night—with her brilliant monologue (any idea how hard it is to do a one-hour monologue?), visual presentation and staging, as well as her acting and writing acumen—was Pulitzer-worthy. Wendy Wasserstein 2.0. A game-changer for those for whom "weight" is a constant adjective in their day-to-day lives.

One more thing: I, too, moved here from New York City. While I have friends now and feel comfortable, the chasm—the distance, if you will—between life in a city like New York and life here felt like a bridge too far to cross. Frances built that bridge. We are all the same, and we are all good enough.

Major kudos to Christina Belknap, the Executive Director, who brought this to the stage when others might not have seen its potential, as well as to the Lincoln Theater’s Damon Leibert, whose execution of the visuals, critical to the monologue, was worthy of the best Broadway production teams.

I beg the Lincoln Theater to bring it back for another performance so those who missed it will have a second chance to be changed forever.

Christine Merser

Edgecomb