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.