Anne Marie Scheffler is Suddenly Mommy!

February 10, 2016 · 0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield
Each woman who embarks on the adventure of becoming a mother for the first time believes she can be a mother.
They read books, change the diapers of babies that they know, talk to their mothers, attend classes — all that. However, nothing can prepare a lady for the abrupt change to everything as Anne Marie Scheffler makes one hilarious point after another.
Here is her problem: When, as a formally independent single girl, she becomes a wife, mother and step-mother, the new realities come crashing down like a culture shock. Come the day, the moment when the bump becomes an actual person, totally dependent and completely pre-occupying, the realities of balancing what was one’s life before and after are often, suddenly, very surprising.
So Anne Marie Scheffler tells her audiences in her brilliant show, Suddenly Mommy, opening at Theatre Orangeville Feb. 18, and running through to March 6.
Scheffler has toured with Suddenly Mommy to rave reviews across North America, including New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.
Her one-woman show has had audiences roaring with laughter as she presents the unforeseen difficulties of missing her highly social former life with the extraordinary ties these new persons in her life — her two sons, husband and step-child — impose. All the complex emotions and simple needs are thrown out to the audience with high humour and in a way that every mother and (now adult) child will relate to.
An alumnus of Second City, Scheffler has an impressive list of credits to her career, with seven other one-woman shows, she has equally toured across the continent. More than this, her considerable successes in television and film include She’s So Funny and Adventures in Comedy. She was a regular cast member on Real Men.
Her play Not Getting It was produced as a one-hour comedy special for CTV and the Comedy Network and garnered her a nomination for a Canadian Comedy Award. She is co-writer and co-star of Spank! Fifty Shades of Parody, which rocked audiences in more than 60 cities, with sold-out performances across the USA, Canada and the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival.
Currently, she is working on a television series with Emmy-winning writer Rosie Schuster (SNL).
What we will learn for sure, through the laughs, for those of us who don’t already know it, is that in the early years of motherhood, it is pretty difficult to mix a hands-on mothering gig with being glamorous. It is true that children, in theory, go to bed earlier than their parents, but what is left? Is the mother still up to wild sensuality and raging good times when the day of dealing in infantile problems has her feeling a little weary, to say the least of it?
When we think, as adults, we should be in command of our situations and be able to offer endless patience to our beloved little ones, to see those concepts blown away by sheer weight of sleeplessness and not as much wisdom and patience as we thought we were heir to, what is next?
Perhaps, a few days off. Which is where you will see Scheffler when you hurry to catch Suddenly Mommy by one of Second City’s most successful progenies.
Suddenly Mommy is on at Theatre Orangeville from Feb. 18 to March 6. Tickets and information at the box office on Broadway (Town Hall); telephone 519-942-3423 and online www.theatreorangeville.ca