More about Extraordinary People...

with photos and a review

Yes, I write a lot of things. Poetry, novels, essays, articles, this newsletter ... but at heart I am a playwright. When I first started writing plays in 1976, I had only every been published as a poet. But plays! I didn't know I could, but I did wrote a comedy with music about conjoined twins, and it was produced in May 1977. Opening night of Transcendental Trepidation remains one of the primary highlights of my life.

After that, I wrote Death After Death, a comedy about dying, produced but not as successful. Then I wrote The Notorious McCorkle Sisters, a comedy with music about two sister outlaws in the old wild west. Produced, and successful. Next I joined forces with my friend with whom I had co-founded the women's theatre company Actors' Sorority. Kate Kasten and I wrote the affectionate satire of Nancy Drew as a stage play, a radio play, and a musical. It is The Clue in the Old Birdbath, and was our most successful play to date. It ran in Chicago to sold out audiences for six months. It has been produced in several states, some theaters producing it more than once over the years.

Kate and I also wrote The Lydia E. Menstrual Show, a comedy revue with music. We parted ways in 1980 when I moved from Missouri to Portland, Oregon. We remained friends, and two years ago we reunited to write The Rex Family: Jocasta and Oedipus. This is a comedy suitable for high school and college productions with twenty-three cast members. We had the idea in 1979, but didn't quite finish it. We needed time and the changes that time has wrought to get us to the finish line. I'd love to see it produced, preferably here in Portland. Also I expect Kate wishes it would be produced in Iowa City where she lives.

All in all, I've written almost seventy plays. This past week I was twice asked if Extraordinary People was my first play. Hardly.

Opening night was a success. If opening night had been the only performance of Extraordinary People I'd have been happy. But closing night? Oh my. We sold out and had people on the waiting list. In the end, we got them all in due to a couple of no-shows (their loss!). Everything worked. Every actor was amazing. The technical stuff worked beautifully. The audience laughed at every joke, every nuance. At the end, after the bows, after the applause finally died down, the audience still sat for another minute. It had been a shared experience, and it seemed as if none of us wanted it to end.

Marty Davis, the owner/producer of Shoutout (an online journal) came and took the photographs you see here. Bob Hicks, Portland's premier theater critic, came and loved it. I'll post it below.

All week I've been walking on air. After Wednesday night I can't help thinking maybe I should stick to comedy for a while ...

What was the highlight of your week last week? What brought you joy?

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As promised, the review from Bob Hicks, Theatre Reviewer for Oregon ArtsWatch, DramaWatch:

The cast of Wednesday evening’s Fertile Ground Festival staged reading of “Extraordinary People” applauds playwright Sandra de Helen (left) at the end of the show. Photo: Marty Davis

The setup of Sandra de Helen’s Extraordinary People sounds almost as off the charts as Triffle’s Mission Gibbons: Three sets of adult conjoined twins, variously still conjoined or surgically separated, gather for the funeral of a fourth set of conjoined twins, who have died in an auto accident. (Check that: One of the surviving twins, who’s refused to see her sister since their abrupt separation 10 years earlier, doesn’t show up for the funeral.)

But while Triffle’s theater is a theater of movement and exaggeration, de Helen’s is a theater of language, and the dialogue of the six characters nudges the play away from their highly unusual physical circumstances and toward a more familiar common question: How do we reconcile our desire for a private life with the reality of our connections with other people.

At heart, Extraordinary People is a comedy, in the gentle sense: an exploration of the ways in which closeness can be too-closeness, a blessing or a curse; and in the ways that ordinary people (for in crucial ways these extraordinary people are also ordinary) find the right blend of companionship and independence in their lives. The lines crackle with both wit and yearning, providing plenty of laughter as they delve into some core human complexities.

I saw de Helen’s play Wednesday evening at the Back Door Theatre, in its second and final performance in this year’s Fertile Ground Festival of new works. It was presented as a staged reading, with chairs and music stands for the six performers and for Larry Toda, who read the stage directions. No blocking, no set, no costumes — just, let’s hear the script itself, coming out of the mouths of good actors, and see how it’s working in front of an audience.

That’s business as usual at Fertile Ground, where you might sometimes see a full finished production of a new show but are more likely to see works-in-progress: staged readings, workshop productions, pieces that writers and directors want to see get on their feet for a look and figure out what their next steps might be. For audiences, it’s a rare opportunity to see artworks in the making, before the fine-tuning and final revisions. That sense of being in the midst of an evolving beast provides much of the festival’s excitement.

At Wednesday’s reading, Chrisse Roccaro and Sharonlee McClain were a crack comedy duo as Lulu and Linda, the still-conjoined twins, and were joined ably by Jane Ferguson as the twin who escaped and Barbara Lusch as the twin who was left behind; Michael J. Teufel as the he who was a she, and Stephanie Torres de los Santos as his sister, the aptly named Hope. Louanne Moldovan directed.

My sense of this show-in-the-making? It’s a good, appealing script with good, appealing characters, and I hope it moves on to a full production.

***

Proud playwright in her velvet jacket