Olivia Boyce-Abel should know. Members of her family sued and countersued one another for 13 years, striving for control of her mother's large estate. I honestly believe that if my family members had experienced one of these plays, it might have changed things dramatically. As a consequence of her own experience, Boyce-Abel has become a professional facilitator for estate planning and wealth transfer, and serves as an advisor to Shaking the Tree. But in our society, money is just about the last taboo.
Nobody wants to talk about it.
So the actors in a Shaking the Tree production do it for them. But the show doesn't stop at the edge of the stage. At the end of a production, the audience is encouraged to pose questions to the actors while they are still in character. Audience members might ask what a character's motivation was for behaving a certain way toward another character. They might even ask technical questions about inheritance or charitable foundation matters.