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Confessions of a killer
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SCOTT MACDONALD | 411 Playwright Erica Hemenway slips into character as Janis the killer. AARON LEWIS PHOTOGRAPHY Kendra Owens as Diane Garing and Gloria Belle Whaley as Janis in 'Waiting to Dance.'
THE 411
"Waiting to Dance" WHEN 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Feb. 18 WHERE Historic Hoover Theater, 1635 Park Ave., San Jose GETTING IN Tickets are $13 for students, teachers and seniors and $18 for all others on Thursday and Sunday, and $15 or $20 on Friday and Saturday. PHONE (408) 3514440 ONLINE www.renegadetheatre.com |
Hemenway, who now lives in Monterey, pretended to be that character while wandering the streets of the 8-million-person-city when she was an 18-year-old student at the American Musical & Dramatic Academy.
"I had a really great teacher there and one day she gave us an assignment," Hemenway said last week, relaxing at Morgan's Coffee & Tea in Monterey. "For one day, we had to go out in the streets as a character and live as that character for a whole day. The goal was, if you met anybody, you were supposed to convince them you were whomever it was you were trying to be."
Now, more than seven years later, Janis can be seen on stage in Hemenway's play, "Waiting to Dance." Performances run through Feb. 18 at the Historic Hoover Theater in San Jose.
The Renegade Theatre Experiment is producing the show, which Hemenway continued working on after she started school at California State University, Monterey Bay, in 2000.
The characters come together
"Waiting to Dance" features Janis, originally a character from one of Hemenway's short stories, alongside four other so-called villains, all women: a temptress, a corrupter, an adulteress and a slut. The five women are brought together and told to confess their crimes, but it's up to audiences to figure out the truths and lies that are told.
Hemenway came up with the idea not long after completing the assignment at AMDA.
"We had these acting journals we were supposed to be keeping, and I was writing in the journal about it and thinking, 'You know, what if I did this with the other characters from these other short stories I've written?'" she said. "'What would happen if they all met? What if they were in a room someplace where they couldn't leave?'
"I wrote, 'That would make an interesting play.' And my acting teacher read the journal and gave it back to me and said, 'Do it.' That was her comment on the page. I looked at these characters and (asked myself), 'How do you get people from different states and different times in one place and keep them there?' which is how I came up with the idea of bringing them to purgatory, where the play is set."
Play first staged at CSUMB
During her first year at CSUMB, Hemenway didn't work on the script.
Instead, she acted in campus productions such as "The Vagina Monologues." But after meeting fellow actors there, she realized they could be perfect for the five roles of the story she'd created.
In November 2001, Hemenway staged the first three performances of "Waiting to Dance" through a CSUMB workshop at Music Hall. She directed the shows and appeared on stage as Janis.
"It was really well received by the audience," she said. "It was like this whole world opened up to me that I'd never considered before. I just went, 'Oh my God, playwriting, this is totally what I want to do.'"
In April 2004, about a month before Hemenway graduated, another workshop for "Waiting to Dance" was held.
"Two years later there had been rewrites to the script and the ending had been changed," she said. "We did that one at the Meeting House in CSUMB, which from a production point was a nightmare because that space is an old military building and was not prepared to handle stage lights.
"We had to repair fuse boxes, bring in the stage, lights, curtains and set it up the day of, do the show that night, tear it down, the next day set it up again, do the show, tear it down for three nights of production."
Although she didn't appear in the second production, Hemenway again directed it.
And this time, the hard work of putting on the show was more than just well received by one particular visitor -- a member of the Renegade Theatre Experiment's board of directors.
That board member, Bill Jamaca, mentioned to others at Renegade that he was interested in producing "Waiting to Dance." Within a few months, Hemenway had submitted her script to the theater group and met with Renegade founders Sean Murphy and Whitney Quinn Stebbins.
"They do make it a point to sort of reach out to alternative voices and stories that aren't necessarily told," Hemenway said. "I started going up to see their shows and the Hoover Theater is actually a really nice theater. It's got the best seats of any theater I've been to. It's a small and intimate venue, which personally I enjoy because I do small and intimate drama.
"I just feel like they're wanting to do the same thing that I'm wanting to do -- challenging people to think when they're seeing a show, not shying away from topics that would be taboo. It's a bold company to put on the shows that they put on and then to take a chance on me."
Play is director's first for RTE
Stebbins, who's directing the show, said she liked the idea of producing a play that features women in all the leading roles.
"My emphasis actually was in directing, but I had never gotten around to doing anything with it," Stebbins said. "I've been a lifetime actor rather than anything else. It just took the right piece. I know when Sean picked the piece I had already indicated to him I was interested in directing it. And after reading it, it was exactly the type of piece I would be best at, I think."
Stebbins also appreciated the ease of understanding the five women in the script.
"That was really important and interesting to me, how (Hemenway) was able to really capture five such different women," she said. "And for me personally to have related to all five of the characters was quite an accomplishment, I thought."
Hemenway said that aspect of "Waiting to Dance" is one that seems to resonate with everyone.
"I think when the actors start to read it, they pick up on it, they can find it's a real person too," she said. "And if it's real to the playwright, it becomes real to the director, it becomes real to the actors and at that point becomes real to the audience. And when you have these women that are up there baring their souls, crying and screaming and practically, metaphorically, bleeding on stage for you, I think that anyone at some point can go, 'I know her, that's my mother, I know her, that's my sister, I know her, that's me.'"
'This pretty much never happens'
Steven Levinson, a professor in CSUMB's Teledramatic Arts and Technology Department, said Hemenway's recognition by a professional theater group shows the playwright's potential.
"It's essentially unheard of," Levinson said. "We're incredibly proud a student who did a workshop production here at a young age is already getting a production of her play at a recognized theater in a big city. That pretty much never happens.
"We were really happy to have a flexible structure in our institution that allowed her to work on the script and see how the words sound in the actors' mouths on a real stage."
Levinson, who consulted Hemenway on her script while she was at CSUMB, said her work is beneficial not only to her career but also to the university's image.
"It shows unusual understanding of human character, much deeper than what you would expect from a young college student," he said. "There's a huge variety of characters -- the women come from very different backgrounds and there's a real sensitivity from where they come from and what they've become.
"I think it just shows that we have a program here that allows people to develop the way they need to develop. We're not known primarily as a theater department, but because of the structure there's a potential to develop theater production and do a good job of it."
The significance of the premiere of "Waiting to Dance" is a bit harder for Hemenway to comprehend since her life hasn't changed much so far: she walked to Morgan's with her roommate after a day of work at the Pebble Beach Resorts spa.
"It feels so unreal," she said. "It honestly did not hit me until two weeks ago when newspapers started asking to talk to me. They're like, 'We're going to do a story,' and I'm like, 'Really, why? Oh God, I actually have a show going up, don't I? It's actually happening!'
"I wish I could be more eloquent, but it's just really cool."
Originally published Thursday, February 9, 2006