Hand-Sewn Love: Women Talkin Story

  Archetypal Theater:
Backyard Stage Productions Presents

Tiare Newport, Edie Barrett and Heidi Townshend-Zellner
Center Stage Theater, February 15th. and 17th. 2008.
Santa Barbara, California

How easy it is to forget the joy and the mystery of live performance, free of special effects, electronic props, epileptic lighting and inflated spectacle. Few realities are as powerful and riveting as the human voice and the human body. I attended the emotionally-charged and authentically executed performances of, in this order: Tiare Newport, Edie Barrett and Heidi Townshend-Zellner on opening night of their two night performances. Sponsored in part by the Opus Archives on Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Montecito campus and in honor of Marion Woodman’s life-long dedication and work on behalf of women and men seeking their own embodied voice, the performance, a sell-out on Friday evening, was by turns funny, poignant, sad, melancholy, joyful, celebratory and true to each of the performers’ own biographies.

I was reminded, as Tiare Newport led off with her reminiscence of falling in love with a cowboy construction worker busy across the street from her home, of Edie Barrett’s “Bus Ride to Transformation” of growing up poor in Arizona, and of Heidi Townshend-Zellner’s recollection both of studying drama and rehearsing again a scene from her college years and remembering the presence of her father at her performance, of  two earlier classic literature: Thornton’s Wilder’s Our Town and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I enjoyed a fine performance of the former at The Cleveland Playhouse over 40 years ago and still carry memories of the various characters’ stories.

Following in that tradition of individual characters appearing on stage, alone, with a prop or two for support to help tell their story, to render it here and now, the three women performers were as persuasive and poignant in their narratives as was Our Town’s persuasive force had on me years ago. Very different in effect and in substance, nonetheless, all three of their stories rendered something tangible and lasting in the images each evoked, the language each developed, as each wrote her own script, and the authenticity that pulled every member of the audience along with them. How could one not relive one’s own awakening to something essential in oneself through the prism of these biographies, now dramatically realized and poetically expressed.

Tiare’s slow, easy drawl which she assumes as part of the costuming of her narrative, “The Cowboy” was by turns ironic, witty, teasing, seductive and sly to match the overt fashion of courtship at the moment when two souls attempt to explore the mysterious terrain of one another’s world to discern if there is enough commonality for dinner, to say nothing of an overnight stay. As she related how she came to see the cowboy construction worker as a possible partner with shelf life longer than a one-night stand, she transforms herself in her stripping away one set of clothing to reveal another, more in keeping with her growing compatibility with the fellow she begins to love. With an easy grace and a flirtatious glance at us more than once, she draws us into the emotional barometric pressure that good acting insists we participate inside of, less as viewers and more as conspirators in the loose and lively game of love.

At the end of her narrative we know something more and more deeply, about the strange meanderings of Eros as one of the most powerful forces in the scaffolding of any life; listening to Tiare remember her pilgrimage to a new love brought me to love once more, loving as the most human and humane of personal experiences. A small table, two chairs and a table cloth were the only props she needed to convey the intimacy of one becoming two.

Edie Barrett’s story, “A Bus Ride to Transformation,” turned us all dramatically on a right angle. Poignant, but absent self-pity, she related growing up poor and dirty in a home more fit perhaps for demolition than habitation, with dry dog turds in the living room as the secular icon for trash, and the admission that for many years of her childhood she wore no clothing that had not been inhabited by at least one other body for long stretches of time. But her moment of revelation, both very funny and deeply serious, came in the form of the syrupy Aunt Jemima bottle, a sweet fragrant version of the Blessed Virgin, and a matching soul, Uncle Ben, immortalized on the orange box of “converted” rice. Now that word “converted” is the short version of Edie’s narrative pilgrimage. By means of these two guides and mentors, as a Beatrice and Virgil to Edie’s wandering soul seeking some grounding in a salvific experience to steal her from her poverty, she takes a Greyhound Bus ride across the

United States

.

That voyage comprises a turning point in her life: a new perspective, new gratitude, new underwear, a new vision, especially as they are accompanied by the recognition that living deep in her being is a black woman, an inner voice of wisdom named Savannah Jones. What Edie relates in her tongue-in-cheek narrative, punctuated with a howling sense of FUNNY, is a call to her own destiny. Perhaps the best image for this she pulls from her basket of tricks and cloth bundle of a clothes basket: through a converted bottle of syrup in the image of Aunt Jemima we sense a close relation now, more than just “aunt,” in an adorned black Madonna suitable for placing in any church that prides itself on authentic soul-seeking. Edie’s ability to see in the ordinary items of a grocery store shelf a profound metaphor for her own life journey is the mark, for me, of an authentic poet.

To the stars she often turns in order to give thanks—another very Dantesque gesture as the poet ends Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso with the same word: setlli, the stars. Comical, cosmic yet hardly cosmetic, her persona, developed with wit, clarity and several strokes of genius, allowed us to witness first hand not someone who was going to fight her poverty, but rather one who would see into it the means of one’s own redemption.

Finally, Heidi’s performance, “Running With My Father” fully measured and more than capable of following two very tough acts, offered another style of reality and reminiscence. I enjoyed her moving back into a role she performed as a graduate student in theater that revolved around searching for lost gloves, and then shifting cross-stage to a stool in which she entered time present to reflect on that burgeoning actress she had only moments before been. After one or two shuttles of this kind, a strange phenomenon ensued—time present and time past merged into one seamless myth of her life, with time itself a single arching reality that encompassed one story, inflected through the prism of understanding her relationship with her father. Her stage performance was a dramatic rendering of a resolution of her ambivalence towards her father. I thought this role most difficult to attend to: slipping back and forth through a wrinkle in time to give us a complete and completely formed experience of her love and her wounds, both originating from the same parent.

At the end of her performance she revealed a stroke of genius: silent, she attends to a small frame that has been turned away from us during her performance; now, in reverence equal to Edie’s reverence for her Aunt Jemima icon, Heidi simply reaches down, turns the frame towards us to reveal a small photo of her father’s face, allowing him a silent presence in image to match his presence through her narrative. With that simple gesture she silently walks off stage. I wanted her to return and yet knew she could not, should not, would not.

Taken together, these three engaging performers with both similar and ferociously unique gifts for story, offered each of us witnessing them parts of our own narratives back to us. When a performance, a narrative, a reminiscence can muster the power to return to those witnessing it a piece of themselves they had forgotten or chose to discard, then the performance is more than complete; it is profound. Such is what we were gifted with Friday evening in the magic dark room of live theater. Would that they have a second act to follow. No doubt the house would once again be a sell-out.

Dennis Patrick Slattery

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