My husband and I went on a date this weekend. Before we left, I instructed our 14-year-old to make something kid-friendly for him and his younger brother to eat – mac and cheese, hot dogs, burritos, or something equally “nutritious.”

When we arrived home later that evening, I asked my 10-year-old what they had for dinner. “Brownies and chocolate milk,” he said.

Then he assured me they were homemade brownies, which of course, makes all the difference in the world because homemade brownies are naturally more nutritious than other things they might have chosen to eat. Such as M & Ms, I guess. And the chocolate milk just topped off that yummy, chocolaty high.

Oh well. I guess I can let them eat brownies for dinner once in a while. While my kids were dining on brownies, my hubby and I were eating East Indian food in downtown Seattle. We had been heading to our favorite steakhouse, but traffic was so bad that we missed our reservation time by 40 minutes. So we went to Plan B.

After dinner we attended the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s production of Memory House, a superbly-acted play about the relationship between a mother and her daughter whom she’d adopted from Russia.

The theme revolves around a college application essay the daughter has to finish writing in less than two hours and take to the post office by the deadline (midnight, New Year’s Eve). Like all good moms, the character of Maggie incessantly nags her daughter, Katia, to finish the essay.

As Maggie assembles and bakes a blueberry pie (she actually creates the entire pie from scratch during the play), Katia eventually reveals the reason she’s reluctant to finish her essay – the question she’s supposed to answer requires her to construct a “memory house” – a collection of significant memories from her childhood.

As Maggie and Katia begin to explore memories together, several significant issues regarding Katia’s life before and after her adoption emerge.

After the play, as my husband and I shared a piece of “to die for” chocolate cake at a deli, we agreed that the playwright (Kathleen Tolan) must have an intimate knowledge of adoption, because she was right on target in regards to the adoption-related issues that surfaced during the course of the play.

The only thing about the play that turned both of us off was the overuse of the “F” word. In the play, the daughter, Katia, first used the expletive during a scene in which she was angry. But then both characters seemed to begin warming up to it, and they used it regularly throughout the rest of the play. Am I totally out of touch with reality or is this a word mothers and their 17-year-old daughters commonly use during everyday interactions?

All I can say is that if I had ever used the “F” word in my mother’s presence, I wouldn’t be alive to tell you about it. In our home, we didn’t even use the word “fart.” So I found the use of the word somewhat distracting and disturbing.

But other than the overuse of coarse language (which these days, one unfortunately expects when one goes to the theatre), the play was excellent. The actresses’ timing was impeccable, with the pie-making scenes adding a bit of philosophical comic relief to a serious and thought-provoking play.