In Conversation

A mother who performs her life.

A daughter who refuses the script.

A family held together by appearances - until the night everything breaks open.

In Conversation explores the tension between who we are and who we're expected to be. It is a play about the fragile architecture of family - the silences that shape us, the roles we inherit, and the truths we spend years avoiding. When a mother and daughter finally confront the fault lines between them, their world tilts toward something neither expected: not reconciliation, but the possibility of it.

Told in a hybrid form that blends dialogue, gesture, and the unspoken, this is a story of two women learning, painfully and imperfectly, how to see each other at last.

Michael Goetze was born in Brazil to a German father and Brazilian mother. After a military coup, the family moved to Germany, and later to South Africa, where he grew up. His refusal to serve in the apartheid-era military led to a period away from the country before he returned to work in the family business. Now heading toward retirement, he is finally publishing the works he has written over a lifetime. In Conversation is his first book. When not writing, he is in the garden or working on various DIY projects around the house. He lives in South Africa and is currently working on a poem reflecting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.