THE BIRTH

It was the Spring of 1993 in Vancouver, Canada. Six women who had once been exciting, glamorous and professional actors were now exhausted, bedraggled amateur mothers with ten children under six between them. They decided to get together to write a show about motherhood.

They met regularly on Saturday mornings with their children. They talked, they laughed, they whined, they complained and they laughed some more. Suddenly their first performance was just three weeks away. Although they had nothing on paper, they felt enormously better about their children, their skills as mothers and their lives in general. They had reinvented group therapy. Luckily, in the ancient tradition of oral history, they remembered each other's stories and Mum's the Word was born.

Thirteen years and more than fifteen thousand performances later, Mum's the Word has crossed the international dateline and the equator.