"Keeper"
Tipping Point Theatre
Northville, Mich.
Aug. 1, 2025
Art as therapy has never felt so literal to me as Michelle Murphy’s “Keeper,” which had a recent three-day run at Tipping Point Theatre.
The one-woman biographical performance depicted Murphy’s discovery of self-worth — how she learned to recognize herself as a “keeper” — after rejection and abandonment by her father as a young child.
Couched in her favorite memories of her youth at summer camp, she processed these difficult emotions through the safety of her happy place, sharing glimpses of her pain and uncertainty between exuberant camp songs and activities.
The play opened with Murphy’s ebullient arrival on stage, full of the enthusiasm and hyperactivity of a 6-year-old who was about to start her first day of summer camp.
While some children might suffer separation anxiety when leaving their parents, Murphy was excited for a week of canoeing, games, and freedom, not comprehending and annoyed by the tearful campers who had come down with this affliction called “homesickness.” As years went by, she had her camp trajectory planned out: Attend as a camper each summer until her teenage years, before she could become a counselor-in-training and eventually a proper camp counselor as an adult.
But behind the joyous façade, the dark places crept up. We found ourselves in an ambiguous setting of a man breaking up with a woman in her driveway, only to discover the “break-up” conversation was a father’s rejection of his daughter. After being released from prison when Murphy was 4 years old, her father won the lottery and left the family to begin a new one with another woman, the beginning of a “Why keep them and not me?” series of thoughts that would haunt her over the next few decades.
Despite the positive aspects of summer camp, Murphy learned to cope with pain through the nurse’s toxic recommendation of “food band-aid” and later “boy band-aid” (she was apparently too young for “alcohol band-aid”), leading to decades of emotional suppression.
Of course, those feelings leaked out. In a particularly low moment, we were taken into a scene where a 13-year-old Murphy was ostracized and bullied by her friends for supposedly spreading a rumor, which she had nothing to do with. She had shrunken down to a self-described “speck” of herself, experimenting with self-cutting and contemplating a tragic fall down the stairs to dull the pain.
Luckily, not all of Murphy’s parental figures were failures. After the cutting/stairs incident, her mother saw that “speck” and recognized her cry for help and came to her rescue, marching into the school and addressing the rumor issues head-on with the primary bully and her mother. (It was a wonderfully triumphant moment.) Murphy recalled watching the power drain from the bully as hers began to rise, recognizing she was not the only victim in the situation. Her next-door paternal grandmother was also her champion, filling in the second parent hole left by her son. Murphy’s stepfather also stepped up, and she thanked him in the audience that night for his support throughout her life.
While Murphy said she hadn’t performed the show in over a year, she said it still broke her into a million pieces every time, which was palpable. Her vulnerabilities were exposed, her emotions were raw, and few dry eyes remained when it was time for the final bow.
Thankfully, Murphy turned out OK. The depth of her pain juxtaposed with the joy of her camp memories was a testament to her acting skills. After finalizing processing her trauma, she recognized that in spending so much time missing the parent who abandoned her, she didn’t appreciate the one who stayed.
I loved the concept of the show. Trauma is hard to process; watching someone work through years of difficult emotions within the safety of her happiest memories was fascinating, even inspiring to those struggling to cope through their own vulnerabilities. “Keeper” is a keeper.
