What activity brings up some combination of the following: tears, laughter, fondness, exasperation, gallows humor, surprise, bewilderment, overwhelm, wonder, regret, fear, and nostalgia?

The answer? Cleaning out the family home, the one you and your siblings grew up in, the one your parents lived in until their dying day. 

Things is a pop singer-songwriter musical about how Kate and her two older brothers–Blake, and Peter, the eldest–reckon with the material possessions of their family life. 

The narrative arc of the show explores how the siblings navigate (separately and together) the emotional terrain of this once-in-a-lifetime experience: dismantling a generation's scaffolding of stuff. How do you do it responsibly, in a way that honors your parents’ memory and the realities of your own life?

As the three siblings start in on the monumental task, each begins to understand that things–the objects and effects that make up the material dimension of our lives–aren’t just things. Every item gets imbued with a special meaning when you’re finally confronted with getting rid of it forever. 

Suddenly something you never even cared about, hadn’t seen in 30 years, or never even knew existed, takes on immense emotional gravity in the light of your family history and your deceased parents’ legacy. 

Are you really going to get rid of the set of orange mixing bowls your mom used to make the chocolate chip cookies you ate almost every day after school? But you already have a set of mixing bowls, and you live in a tiny apartment in New York City. What about the condolence letters written to your grandmother when the grandfather you never knew died? Surely you have to keep those, but where? And when will you ever find the time to read them? Your dad’s pipe? You don’t smoke, but your memories of him have an olfactory dimension because of that very object. And your mother’s hippopotamus problem, which, now that she’s dead, is your problem. Ceramic hippos, pewter hippos, glass hippos. Who has room for all of these treasures? Or are they trash?

What do you keep? What do you give away? If your parents cherished an object or used it or kept it, does that mean you have to? What does that choice say about you or your siblings? One person wants to pass things along to their kids; another is gay and chose not to have kids; and another is trying to keep the peace. 

“Death cleaning” is how it’s phrased these days. Grief, memory, clutter–a knotty trio of topics. 

In the show, present-day scenes are interwoven with flashbacks to the 80s when the house buzzed with the energy of a young family. We watch mom and dad parent each kid a little differently. The show explores how themes of birth order and gender play into who we become and how we navigate the world. 

Eventually, though, the job’s got to get done, the house needs to be emptied and sold. A plot twist puts pressure on the siblings in a way they never could’ve imagined. Personalities clash and quarrel. What’s grief’s timeline? Says who? What happens when you have to act against your emotional needs? How do you make space for your siblings’ experiences of loss when there isn’t time to? What are the consequences of decisions made under duress? What about the issue of class in all of this? That you are a family with heirlooms says something. Are those heirlooms a burden, a privilege, or both?

Things explores the blithe illusion that most of us live out every day: namely, that most of the material objects surrounding us are just things. 

But things are never just things. 

As the chorus of the title song of the musical says, “Things, don’t mean a thing, without the memories that go with ‘em, the day in day out living of a life. And what’s a life? If not the time we get to share, with the people who we care about. I know I’ll get through this but how? Things are all I’m left with now.”

The music and lyrics are co-written by the Grammy-nominated, hit songwriter Steve Seskin and the award-winning songwriter Kate Schutt. The book is by Kate Schutt.

Steve Seskin is a singer, songwriter, and touring performer who has written seven number-one songs, including the Grammy-nominated “Grown Men Don’t Cry,” as recorded by Tim McGraw. His songs have been cut by artists such as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Waylon Jennings, Colin Raye, and Mark Wills among others.

Kate Schutt is an award-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer whose voice NPR calls “glassily clear and glossily sweet.” Kate’s songs have won top honors from the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and ASCAP. She’s shared stages with a who’s who of the jazz world: Terri Lyne Carrington, Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, Scott Colley, and Bernard Perdie, to name only a few. Her music is featured in the ground-breaking, Grammy-winning collection of songs by female jazz composers called New Standards Vol 1.