Seeking Catharsis
Annie Lareau ’86 translates personal tragedy for the stage
By Nancy Shohet West ’84
Why would anyone choose to relive the most traumatic moments of their life, day after day, reenacting those horrific memories on stage in front of an audience of strangers?
It’s a question Annie Lareau ’86 has answered often, ever since the premiere of her three-person play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in summer 2025. Fuselage explores a horrible experience from her past: the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. Eight of Lareau’s closest friends from Syracuse University were on that flight, including her best friend, Theodora Cohen. Lareau and her classmates had just completed a semester in London; she had chosen to fly home a day later than her friends.
Lareau says she was always a theater kid. As a little girl growing up in Denver, she attended plays and concerts with her mother, Marten Ann Poole ’58. In middle school, she joined the drama club. Her love of the stage blossomed during her three years at Concord Academy, where she performed in productions including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, After Magritte, and several musicals. In her senior year, she tried her hand at directing for the first time.
“I spent almost every hour of my life in the P.A.C. during those years,” she recalls. “Theater allowed me to learn about moving and speaking and storytelling in a way that I don’t think would have been possible elsewhere. I could feel the iambic pentameter when on stage doing Shakespeare. Had I just been handed the book in a classroom, I wouldn’t have had the same experience. CA gave me those opportunities.”
As a junior at Syracuse earning her BFA in acting and directing, Lareau spent a semester in London through the university’s study abroad program for theater majors. “We studied with actors from the London Academy of Performing Arts and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts,” she remembers. “We took classes all day and attended professional performances in the evening. I was having the time of my life.”
The morning of December 21, 1988, Lareau bid farewell to her five flatmates as they left for the airport. Alone in her London flat and packing for her own flight the next day, Lareau turned on the TV. With growing horror, she learned that the flight her friends had boarded that morning—Pan Am 103—had exploded into a ball of flames over Lockerbie. Among the passengers who perished were 35 Syracuse University students. “I knew all of them,” Lareau says.
Nearly incapacitated by grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt, Lareau somehow made it back to campus for the spring semester and again for her senior year. Looking back at a time she now calls “The Great Unraveling,” she recalls a phase marked by bad relationship choices, unsatisfying attempts at therapy, and unrelenting attention from the media, who stalked and harassed Lareau and other bereaved Syracuse students because of the story’s lurid appeal.
Upon graduating, Lareau had just two wishes: to embark upon a career in the theater and to get as far away as possible from Syracuse and the tragedy it had come to represent for her. Moving to Seattle, she performed with a national improv troupe, taught classes at Seattle Children’s Theatre, and adapted classic works of literature for the stage. Her growing interest in the intersection of theater and education led her back east for a year to earn a master’s in education at Harvard, where she studied Carol Gilligan’s work on the ways in which girls’ voices are metaphorically suppressed. When she returned to Seattle, she founded a nonprofit for teen girls that combined outdoor adventure and wilderness skills with art and music. In the years that followed, she was named artistic director of ArtsWest and then of Seattle Public Theater. She married a fellow actor and raised a daughter, who is now herself a college student in London.
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down public performances in 2020, Lareau began writing a long-postponed memoir about the 1988 plane crash and its aftermath, incorporating elements of the trauma that had never fully left her, the grief over losing so many friends, and the poignant experience of visiting the town of Lockerbie in 2019 to meet some of the villagers whose lives had been impacted by the crash.
In 2022, Lareau left her full-time job with Seattle Public Theater to undergo treatment for breast cancer, then earned an MFA in creative writing. Empowered with more free time and the new degree, her thoughts turned to how she might adapt the yet-to-be-published memoir for the stage. The result was the 70-minute play that debuted at Edinburgh Fringe last summer. Over the course of a month, it ran for 25 performances, filling the 140-seat house each time. Lareau played the part of herself, and two other actors played all the other roles.
“People ask me how I could bear to go through this experience on stage, day after day,” she says. “I always answer that yes, it’s very difficult to return to that time in my life, but in doing so, I relive the good parts of it as well: the joyful, funny, crazy moments that my friends and I had together in college and during our months in London. I get to spend time with the memory of those friends: Theo, Miriam, Nicole. After years of holding those memories in my mind as something horrible, now I can revisit that time as something that was also wonderful.”
Lareau is currently planning for productions of Fuselage in Seattle and Syracuse and exploring possibilities for performances in New York City and London during the 2026–27 theater season. While she continues to work consistently as an actor and director across the country, she is also focusing on her writing, having recently published essays in HuffPost and the Brussels Review, among others. In addition, Lareau is working on a lighthearted novel set in the 1980s in Key West, Fla., a place she visited frequently as a girl.
“My background in theater has given me skills in my writing around scene building and dialogue that some people struggle with,” she says. “Going all the way back to my time at CA, I’m a kinesthetic learner. As a director, I’m used to moving bodies around in space. And that has fed my writing in a lovely way.”
