“If you love theatre because you believe it can CHANGE THE WORLD, please consider PUSH!”

-Paul Milisch, Drama Teacher, East HS, Madison WI

​

What would it take to push your child over the edge? 

Christmas Eve, 5 A.M. A deserted Bronx subway station.

Sixteen-year-old Eve Fortunato has returned to the place where her older brother Billy took his life. Wearing his varsity jacket and carrying a grief she can barely contain, she talks to the brother who is no longer there—and struggles to find a reason not to follow him.

Through Eve's memories, the events that brought Billy to the edge begin to unfold. After finally finding the courage to tell his sister that he is in love with a young man named Javier, Billy chooses to reveal the truth to his parents. What should have been an act of honesty instead unleashes rejection at home, cruelty from his classmates and, finally, the loss of the person he believed would stand beside him. Billy didn't simply jump, Eve realizes. In one devastating way after another, he was pushed. 

Now Eve stands at the same edge, furious at her parents, her brother's tormentors, Billy—and herself. But just as she begins to wonder whether there is anything left worth living for, a sound from a nearby trash can changes everything: the cry of an abandoned infant. Eve reaches into the darkness and finds a child as frightened and alone as she is. 

What begins as a confrontation with death becomes an unexpected encounter with life. Holding the baby in her arms, recovering Billy's discarded notebook and hearing her father's first halting attempt to acknowledge the damage he has done, Eve begins to see the possibility of something she could not imagine when she entered the station—a way home. 

PUSH is a raw, compassionate one-act about bullying, LGBTQ+ youth, family rejection, suicide, grief and the extraordinary difference acceptance can make. Ultimately, it is not a play about how a young person dies, but about how another finds a reason to live.​