Can care be enacted through art? Inside a cathedral, staff members from a nursing home work with an artist to perform a poetic text about caregiving, loss, and taking the time to feel one’s feelings. In the months leading up to the performance, the artist navigates her twenties—and art and life converge in unexpected ways.

In Stages: On Dying, Working, and Feeling (Thick Press, 2020), Rachel Kauder Nalebuff has created a stirring work of hybrid nonfiction that takes us behind the scenes of artmaking and caregiving. Melding curiosity, humility, playfulness, and self-deprecation, Stages is an inquiry into the work it takes to sustain a meaningful life.

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff is a writer working often in the realms of performance and oral history. She is editor of My Little Red Book (Hachette, 2009), a collection of people’s first period stories, and co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project (Feminist Press, 2015) with Alexandra Brodsky. She runs a mentor program for seniors with Caitlin Ryan O’Connell and many friends throughout the New York City Department of Aging.

Originally from the North Shore in Massachusetts, Toney Brown is a theater director/performer in New York City. He studied Theater Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In NYC, was a Performance Project Fellow at the University Settlement and adapted Harmony Korine's A Crack Up at the Race Riots at Theater for a New City's Dream Up Festival. In addition, he was worked extensively with the director Dennis Yueh-yeh Li adapting King Lear, assistant directed Maeterlinck's The Blind, and performing in his production of Albert Camus' Caligula (Chaerea) as part of the New Ohio Theater's Producers Club Festival. When he is not podcasting on NBN, he hosts NYTF Radio, a podcast exploring the history of Yiddish Theatre for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, available on all platforms. He is an enthusiastic cinephile and avid Red Sox fan.

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