Mom's Gift at Lincoln Center Magnolia Theatre

“Mom’s Gift,” is a hilarious and poignant award-winning play by Minnesotaborn Phil Olson. Set in a suburban Minneapolis home, the tragic-comic “dramedy” that transports audiences from guffaws to sniffles in seconds. The set-up is based on a daughter’s therapist-ordered return to her family home on her father’s 60th birthday. Mom has been dead for 11 months, but she “shows up” at the party as a ghost with a mission – to accomplish a few tasks so she can finally earn her wings and “live” in eternal peace. But there are so many things to fix in this minimally functional Swensen family. And the problem is complicated by the fact that the only person who can hear or see Mom is her daughter. But one by one the family’s secrets are peeled away revealing a shocking truth that even shocks the visiting apparition. Olson grew up in Edina, Minn. His father’s grandparents emigrated from Norway and homesteaded a farm near Grand Forks, N.D. His mother’s grandparents also came from Norway and settled in Virginia, Minn.