Secrets

They always planned to tell Lisa she was adopted. Maybe when she was six. Maybe when she was more emotionally mature. Maybe … Suddenly the 13-year-old gets a phone call out of the blue: "Hello, I'm your mother." As the long-kept secret comes tumbling out, the once-happy household is torn apart by anger, resentment, and jealousy. Micki, Lisa's birth mother, is an aging flower child, and Lisa is drawn to the romance of her gypsy lifestyle and her protest marches to save the trees, all the more glamorous because they are forbidden. Secretly, Lisa meets with her mother and ends up joining the protesters and the march, and, unwittingly, gets caught up in the violence that follows. The teens who worked on Secrets in its development found it spoke not only to the children of adoption but also to all of them often baffled and upset by the unspoken dynamics of family relationships.