Tuscany

When Kelly Sullivan and Tommy Barkovic found out last July that she would be about 15 weeks pregnant for their September wedding, they knew they wanted to announce it in a big way.

“Kelly was always interested in having a gender reveal as part of our baby process, and when we realized we had the wedding smack-dab in the middle with all the people that we care about there, we really tried to make that a two-for-one opportunity,” said Mr. Barkovic, 31, a financial director at a biotech company.

At their wedding-day cocktail hour in front of about 110 guests in their hometown, Bedford, Mass., Mr. Barkovic wore a caddy outfit over his tan three-piece suit and Ms. Sullivan, who runs a geriatric nursing service and is an avid golfer, swung at a ball. It exploded into a pink puff to indicate a girl.

“People were really touched and happy for us,” said Ms. Kelly, 32, who, a few years after recovering from thyroid cancer and learning that she had a genetic mutation that increased her chances of breast and ovarian cancer, was told that she had a low ovarian reserve and probably wouldn’t be able to have children of her own. “It was such a special moment.”

Christina Gibson-Davis, a sociologist and professor of public policy at Duke University, has seen a steady change in attitudes toward pregnant brides nationwide. “Once, marriage and fertility were basically synonymous,” she said. “There was intense societal pressure to make sure the birth happened within the context of the marriage. There’s no longer that social pressure or stigma.”

The pandemic helped play a role in this shift, Professor Gibson-Davis said, disrupting fertility timing.

Gabriella Carusone, 37, an interior designer, and Simone Astuni, 38, an executive at a tech start-up, decided to try to conceive after pandemic-related wedding delays. After getting engaged in October 2019, the couple, who live in Queens, initially planned to wed in the Tuscany region of Italy in September 2020. They ultimately had to push their date to August 2022.

By then, Ms. Carusone was three and a half months pregnant. Ten days before their wedding, they learned they were having a girl. At a Friday dinner before their Sunday ceremony, once the immediate families arrived in Siena, the couple cut into a white cake with pink filling, surprising all with a joint pregnancy announcement and gender reveal. “Everyone was going nuts,” said Ms. Carusone, who has five nephews.

At their wedding, Mr. Astuni announced to about 90 guests at dinner that they had special company in attendance. Friends and family craned their necks to spot a celebrity visitor or perhaps a musical act before the groom revealed they were expecting a daughter.

Ms. Carusone called being pregnant on her wedding day “a blessing” and said she didn’t feel she was being judged critically.

“My extended family are actually very conservative Italians and one would think that they would say something along the lines of, ‘You get married first, and then you have a kid,’” she said. “But I didn’t receive any of that. Would I have felt it more if I was getting married in a Catholic church with a priest? Maybe.” (The mayor of Chiusdino, in Siena, officiated the couple’s civil ceremony in a deconsecrated abbey.)

The term “shotgun wedding” pretty much summarized how society as a whole once viewed having a baby out of wedlock: An armed father forces the groom to marry his pregnant daughter — or else.

“Mid-pregnancy marriage” is a more appropriate term nowadays, Professor Gibson-Davis said. And a 2016 study for which she was the lead author found that getting married while pregnant was not necessarily associated with a higher incidence of divorce. “You may worry that people are marrying not necessarily because they want to make a lifelong commitment to each other but because they feel like they have to,” she said.

Jeffrey Alexander, a director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale, described mid-pregnancy marriages as “liberated,” “affirmative” and “cool.” He said he believed such weddings were “an expression of feminism and the way that motherhood, sex, love and marriage have become gradually separated from one another.”

“This has been a shift that’s been going on for 10 years,” he said.

Karen Nguyen, 39, and Paul Pisacane, 53, of Mill Valley, Calif., made their pregnancy the focal point of their wedding celebration in August 2021, about 11 months after their legal marriage, a virtual ceremony via San Francisco City Hall.

At their in-person wedding welcome party for about 80 guests, with fire pits and s’mores in Pescadero, Calif., a friend read a poem about superpowers. Theirs, the couple announced, was the ability to plan a wedding celebration while pregnant. Though Ms. Nguyen, a director of engineering at a communications software company, was six and a half months along, she wasn’t showing much and not all the couple’s guests knew she was expecting.

At their wedding reception, she and Mr. Pisacane, a director of regulatory affairs at a biotech company, displayed a Japanese maple tree with cards for guests to hang on the branches with parenting advice or suggestions for baby names. “We wanted a child so much, so for us it was just pure joy,” Ms. Nguyen said.

Still, planning a wedding while pregnant was not without its struggles. “‘What am I going to wear?’ became very tricky,” Ms. Nguyen recalled. The dress she had originally planned on wearing no longer fit by her wedding day, so she ultimately wore a pink dress purchased from the luxury resale site the RealReal. “White didn’t feel like quite the right color since I was pregnant,” Ms. Nguyen said.

Many pregnant brides, though, do opt for traditional white on their wedding day, supporting a growing industry of maternity bridal gowns. According to Tiffany London, founder of the British maternity brand Tiffany Rose , the company sold nearly 18,000 bridal dresses last year (more than 1,500 of them in the United States), and its U.S. wedding dress sales rose 35 percent from two years earlier. In January, the company introduced 10 new styles and its first maternity wedding skirt.

Sara-Lena Klaudrat, 31, a surgical nurse, wore Tiffany Rose to her August 2021 wedding to Lukas Klaudrat, 28, a police helicopter pilot. The couple wed before immediate family when the bride was seven months pregnant in Lech am Arlberg, Austria, near their home in Schruns.

Before buying her maternity wedding gown, Ms. Klaudrat described the dress-shopping process as “horrible.” She had purchased a cocktail dress when she was three months pregnant and was dismayed when she tried it on again before the wedding and no longer liked how she looked in it. “I was crying a lot,” she said.

The couple proudly showcased Ms. Klaudrat’s growing baby bump in a form-fitting Verona maternity wedding gown (the same dress that the actor Julia Stiles wore at her 2017 nuptials ). “It was the perfect timing for us,” Mr. Klaudrat said of the pregnancy and wedding. “I would do it absolutely the same as we did.”

In 2019, Chloe Marx, the founder of Sexy Mama Maternity in Boise, Idaho, started a line of bridal dresses in response to a steady flow of customer emails requesting them. Though she initially wasn’t interested, she saw an opportunity after digging around online.

“I realized there are just not a lot of options,” said Ms. Marx, noting that wedding fabrics have historically been unforgiving and not made of stretchy material.

The fashion sector isn’t the only industry seeing an uptick in mid-pregnancy marriages. According to the wedding registry Joy , there was a 180 percent increase in baby-related items appearing on wedding registries from 2021 to 2022. Travel systems (strollers, infant car seats and wearable carriers) have been the most popular baby-related items lately, along with baby tech and furniture and baby-related cash funds.

According to Corina Beczner of Vibrant Events, who planned Ms. Nguyen and Mr. Pisacane’s wedding, all of these changes reflect a more mainstream acceptance of pregnant brides.

“I think everything is much more culturally relaxed,” she said. “With Gen X and millennials, I think we’ve completely shifted the wedding industry. There’s so much more creativity and uniqueness, and availability to be authentic in all aspects of our lives, and that includes weddings.”

CASTIGLIONCELLO DEL TRINORO, Italy — Just two weeks ago, the lives of four promising playwrights were upended: Not only did they receive an email announcing that their work had been shortlisted for the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize, but they were also invited to participate in a monthlong residency in Tuscany, led by the American playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

Which is how those playwrights found themselves eating gourmet meals this week in a medieval village turned boutique hotel with breathtaking views of the postcard-perfect Val d’Orcia countryside. With access to a sauna and spa, as well as pasta-making classes and truffle-hunting, they are very much in a pinch-me-I-can’t-believe-it’s-true state.

“The first two or three days I was like, ‘How am I here, this is insane,’” Rianna Simons , 21, said of working alongside “very lovely, very talented people in a crazy, beautiful environment.” Simons, a Bermudian-British writer who lives in London, almost didn’t come, she said, laughing, because she initially thought the email about her play “White Girls Gang” was a scam.

There are no hard and fast rules for the fellows in the program, called Substratum, which was conceived by Harris (“Slave Play,” “Daddy”), a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, who judged the competition. “I just want people to write,” he said in an interview this week. The finalists, who were among those who submitted about 1,700 works, are “writers doing something a little different,” he said. “A little off the beaten path.”

The prize went to Jesús Valles for “Bathhouse.pptx,” a play exploring queer history. But because Valles, who is pursuing an M.F.A. in playwriting, was unable to leave their studies at Brown University, the slot went to Raffaella Donatich, Harris’s former assistant and an “exciting emerging writer,” Harris said, adding that she was invited on the strength of her pilot “Sex Act.”

The other fellows, all at various stages of their careers, agreed that having the time to write without distractions — and not having to sweat the small stuff — was the real reward.

“There’s something about having everything taken care of,” said Chloë Myerson , a 32-year-old writer from London whose play “Class” was shortlisted. Being outside of her normal life felt almost like a “weird punishment,” she said, “because as a writer, I’m always trying to carve out space” from the demands of work, relationships and life.

For Donatich, 26, who lives in New York, having “so much unstructured time” was forcing her “to define the reasons why I like the thing I claim to like to do.”

And Asa Haynes, 27, an actor turned playwright from London who was recognized for his work “RACISM: an unfocused theater essay,” said the experience was giving his imagination free rein. “Writing isn’t necessarily sitting down at a table with a glass of water or a cup of tea listening to some music. It’s also taking in the sun, the views, going to the spa and having a very hot sauna,” he said. “Writing is actually a lot more thinking and ruminating.”

This sort of pampering is exactly what Harris envisioned for the fellows participating in the residency — the first, he hopes, of many.

The residency is sponsored by the luxury brand Gucci, which Harris has worked with. “I always remind them that the only reason they know who I am is because of the theater, and so it feels disingenuous of me to accept a paycheck without figuring out a way to bring it back to the theater somehow,” he said.

Having spent time in Italy during pandemic lockdown, he decided it was the perfect place for writers to immerse themselves in an unfamiliar culture and “get the type of inspiration that can really shift an artist’s brain from the consciousness of society that you’re a part of to some new amalgamation of the expat brain,” he said.

He was introduced to Michael L. Cioffi, the owner of Monteverdi Tuscany, the boutique property where fellows are staying. (Monteverdi is underwriting many of the on-property expenses and experiences, like the pasta-making classes.) Cioffi, a Cincinnati-based lawyer, came to Tuscany about two decades ago, and later encountered the decaying hilltop hamlet of Castiglioncello del Trinoro, about halfway between Florence and Rome.

An initial purchase became a passion project, and eventually Cioffi bought many of the hamlet’s houses, transforming abandoned stables and dilapidated farmhouses into guest rooms, a restaurant and a wellness center and spa. Only a few original residents remain.

From the start, Cioffi said in a Zoom interview, he conceived of the Monteverdi as a “place to share with people, but also create a platform where people could really experience the arts in a meaningful way.” He established an artist-in-residence program and a concert series; the property had already attracted the likes of Wes Anderson, who, according to hotel lore, wrote “The Grand Budapest Hotel” there.

“ I was like, well, it already has been like the muse has already wandered the halls there, and I want to meet her and see what she has to offer us,” Harris said of the space.

The group is sharing a six-bedroom house called Muri Antichi (Ancient Walls), with en-suite bathrooms, and spacious common rooms where they’ve been gathering after dinner to watch movies.

Days are mostly self-structured for the fellows. Mentoring has been informal as well. Harris said he was as eager to learn “from everyone here” as he was to mentor the playwrights.

For DJ Hills , 27, whose play “Trunk Brief Jock Thong” was shortlisted, the pampering is giving them a “because you’re worth it” moment. “There is so much flagellation as an artist; I need to be constantly throwing myself onto the ground for my work,” Hills said, adding that time in the spa has been a gift. “I, as an artist, am worth the 30 minutes to be here.”

As for Harris, he is keen to work on projects that had been put on the back burner while he basked in the success of his Tony-nominated “Slave Play” and sundry other projects which, besides modeling for Gucci, include releasing a capsule collection , producing plays, writing for television and cinema and performing in the Netflix series “Emily in Paris.”

“I need to get back to my actual writing,” he said, “because while it’s been really exciting to support other people, I am still an artist, you know, so I need to create my art.”

In the coming weeks, the fellows will encounter a range of artists (and possibly producers), including the filmmakers Pete Ohs (“Jethica”) and Eliza Hittman (“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Beach Rats”), the playwrights Jordan Tannahill and Jasmine Lee-Jones and the author Erika J. Simpson.

Harris’s experience in 2015 at MacDowell, a prestigious artists’ residency program in New Hampshire, also inspired this new program. He called that residency a confidence-boosting experience that “restructured my sense of self,” adding that he hoped the Tuscan experience would do the same for the fellows.

MacDowell also showed him the importance of sharing meals. “That’s the only rule,” he added, “dinners where you can catch up on your day, see how things have gone,” and just talk.

Two recent meals were an indication of the sort of banter that takes place, with topics ranging from — and this is just a small sampling — playwrights contemporary and not (from Aristotle to David Ireland and plenty in between); Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose film “Theorem” they had watched the night before); K-dramas and their Shakespearean influences; British actors doing American accents (not so great, some said); Fassbinder films; the biblical king David; olive oil; Shonda Rhimes (and how she’s not given enough credit for her innovations); a new stage adaptation of “Brokeback Mountain”; Michelin-starred restaurants; elaborate European film titles; and, because Monday was game night, good games to play (Spades, Exploding Kittens, Salad Bowl).

Before dinner, the fellows learned to make ravioli and picci, a local pasta. “Also theater, you know,” said Harris, who had earlier described meals he’d eaten in terms of the pleasure he’d gotten from the chef’s storytelling, even more than the food.

The group kneaded and rolled out the dough and joked happily.

“Jeremy’s like the most wonderful fairy godmother,” Hills said. “We’re very fortunate to have him.”