A Love Story
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- 7 min read
Alison Larkin's solo Show Grief... A Comedy will be filmed for an upcoming special here in her hometown—and you're invited!
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
May/June 2026
It never fails. Whenever I run into Alison Larkin, I can’t help but smile. Maybe it’s her sunny British accent. Maybe I’m anticipating she’ll say something funny. Maybe it’s her genuine warmth and candidness. Whatever it is, this novelist, comedian, and audiobook narrator draws your attention— whether it’s one-on-one, in a small group of people, or in front of a large audience.
That brings me to her latest production, Grief... A Comedy, which will be filmed in front of a live audience. Like most of Larkin’s comedic material, it is inspired by something deeply personal. The show was tested on a few stages here in the Berkshires while it was being developed and premiered in the UK. Now, Larkin is bringing it back home, so mark your calendar for June 12 and 13. Alison Larkin: Grief... A Comedy will be filmed for future broadcast in front of a live audience at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, directed by Scott Floyd Lochmus and produced by Lochmus and Jonathan Gray with Diane Pearlman. It’s an uplifting story about Larkin finding love later in life, losing it just like that, and, despite it all, finding joy and living more fully than ever.
“It’s a love story,” says Larkin.
“It’s a funny title,” says Lochmus, who also found love later in life and was going through the death of his mother when he met Larkin. “There is grief, which is always around, right? Yet it’s a very positive show, and Alison is a very positive person, and that’s what I really love about it, and about her.”
Larkin admits that someone by the name of Archbishop Desmond Tutu encouraged her to write the show. (We’ll get into that later.) She worked with Emmy Award®-winning composer Gary Schreiner to compose short music pieces and then built the story around them to create the performance. The Berkshires is widely known to be a place where new works are tried out in front of a supportive audience.
The earliest version of Larkin’s show was staged at the Great Barrington Public Theater’s Solo Fest in June 2022. After that, Larkin started re-working the script with the Soho Theatre in London and previewed the new version in June 2024 at Barrington Stage, followed by the August 2024 world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival and performances in London and other parts of Britain. It was a smash.
“You have a feeling of privilege while watching this, to even bear witness to a story so beautiful and moving. Larkin does an incredible job of inspiring the audience to be open to love no matter how past trauma may affect your feelings towards it. This is truly a show that could change your outlook on life,” writes Entertainment Now.
“There was a producer who wanted me to do a world tour and another who wanted to produce a New York run,” Larkin says, “and I thought, eight shows a week?” That sounded exhausting to her. “I love performing the show, but some of it’s quite hard for me. I realized I’d much rather film it so it can reach the most people without killing me.”
She got her wish, Grief... A Comedy is now on the fast track to being filmed on Friday, June 12, at 7 p.m. and Saturday, June 13, at 2 p.m. at the Mahaiwe. (Tickets can be purchased at mahaiwe.org.)
No stranger to stand-up, Larkin headlined at The Comedy Store in LA for three years and acted on and off Broadway. She is also bestselling author of The English American, an autobiographical novel about an adopted English woman who finds her birth parents in the United States. And she is a multi-award-winning audiobook narrator.
The story behind her latest production goes back a handful of years ago. Larkin was in her 50s, living in the Berkshires, divorced with two children, and at peace with the idea that love had passed her by. On a snowy Sunday morning in January 2019, she made her weekly visit to The Red Lion Inn, which stocks The New York Times (with her favorite crossword puzzle). When Larkin arrived, the receptionist pointed to a man smiling sheepishly who had taken the last paper. They got to chatting, and it didn’t take long for a relationship to flourish. “I fell madly in love for the first time ever—ever—and our plan was to live in the Berkshires and Vermont and spend time in India and England and California, where he had family.”
Five days after Larkin and her fiancé, Bhima, decided to marry, he suddenly died of a heart attack. After the shock and the numbness passed, she thought back to when she met with Tutu and what he told her.
Larkin was introduced to Tutu ata dinner party in New York by her friend Karen Hayes, who was filming a documentary about him. He asked Larkin to tell him a bit about herself. “I said, ‘Well, I was adopted, and I came to America to find my birth mother, who came fromthe South.’ He said, ‘Did you have a good adoption?’ I said, ‘Yes, I got lucky. Then again, if I’d been adopted by Mia Farrow, I could have been married to Woody Allen.’ He cracked up, and then he found out that I could do a very good Margaret Thatcher impression. So, we had these political conversations, me as Margaret Thatcher and him as Desmond Tutu. We both thought we were very funny.
“At one point he turned to me and said, ‘Look, Alison, seriously, I don’t know why I’m saying this to you, but remember something: I can’t control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond to it.’”
After Bhima’s death, she emailed Tutu. “I said, ‘I avoided love my entire life because I was so afraid of loss and the worst happening, and then I finally found it. But then the worst did happen. Instead of wanting to give up, I’m finding I want to live—and love—more fully than ever. And I’m filled with joy. I don’t understand why I’m not in despair.’”
He wrote back that she had to share her story as widely as possible “because it will bring hope.” Those handful of emails with Tutu are now at the beginning of Larkin’s book, also called Grief...A Comedy, published last May, and a subsequent audiobook.
Larkin’s follow-up book continues the narrative from the show, six weeks after Bhima died, with him turning up at her kitchen table determined to help her find love again. “When somebody we lovevery deeply dies, I genuinely believe that the body may go but the love doesn’t go anywhere,” she says. “All that energy, all that joy, was still inside me, and it’s still here, five and a half years later.” Through the loss of Bhima, Alison finds herself—in the show and in her real life—living more fully than ever, refusing to waste a minute of whatever time she has left.
The show is being filmed by an impressive team: Gray is highly regarded in the independent film community as a New York attorney, producer, and advisor. He started out as her legal representation until he learned more about the show and became a producer. Then he called Lochmus, a friend and prolific producer and director who is based in LA and has filmed artists such as Kristin Chenoweth, Céline Dion, Barbra Streisand, and Jennifer Lopez. He has visited the Berkshires often, including the time when he directed the 2008 TV special Yo-YoMa & Friends: Songs of Joy & Peace that included Ma and his friend James Taylor in TheBarn, Taylor’s home studio.
After both Gray and Lochmus stepped up, Larkin asked Pearlman if she would like to be a producer of the show. “This is deep material for me,” says Larkin. “I’m not just doing a show with the dancing girls. It is very funny, and people come out feeling a lot better than when they came in. But I go—we go—on a journey. And I’m quite a sensitive type. So, I needed somebody local who I knew I could trust, and who can help bring in local people to work with us. Of course, that’s Diane.”
Pearlman is executive director of Berkshire Film and Media Collaborative and an award-winning visual effects producer and film executive known for her leadership at Mass. Illusion, where she oversaw work on Academy Award®- winning films like The Matrix and What Dreams May Come. She is now working with Lochmus and Gray to finalize crew hires and set design, sourcing as much local talent as possible.
“The most exciting thing about it is that we’re going to do this very, very high-end filming for broadcast here in the Berkshires,” says Pearlman. “A lot of times people think, oh, you have to do it New York, or you have to do it in LA. No, we can do this here.”
The four converged in the Berkshires in early March to do some scouting and a photo shoot. The project has a tight timeline, with rehearsals and set construction planned for the first of June. Lochmus plans to arrive on June 9 and jump right into the final stages of preparation.
“If I could build The Red Lion Inn, I would,” says Lochmus. “I want to have windows. I want seasons to change during the show. I want to have lots of different lighting cues that are reflective of the characters she’s performing.”
He emphasized the importance of maintaining a positive tone in the show.
“It’d be very easy to go into this other space,” he says. “Alison just doesn’t go there and doesn’t want anyone to go there. It’s going to be this great, feel-good piece.”
And after the show, Larkin is looking forward to talking with the audience members. She wants to share her experience and hear other people’s stories.
Alison Larkin’s hit show Grief... A Comedy comes to the Mahaiwe on June 12 (7 p.m.) and June 13 (2 p.m.), where it will be filmed before a live audience for an upcoming special. Tickets at mahaiwe.org.
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