In a career that ran to more than 100
productions in both professional and community theater, Fenner appeared
with the likes of Burgess Meredith and Basil Rathbone. For local
companies, like Salt City Center for the Performing Arts and
Contemporary Theatre of Syracuse, she took leading roles in works by
Noel Coward, William Shakespeare and Harold Pinter. After a
much-praised Amanda in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie
in the early 1990s, she and her late husband, Dr. Gerald F.
Reidenbaugh, decamped for Greensboro, N.C., where they both became
active in local theater. Shirley continued on the floorboards after
Gerald died in 1994, and she developed this show and first performed it
there.
The shorter “Tin of Tube Rose” by Sandra
Redding, in effect the first act, calls for a working-class accent,
with rounded-off-ings. Redding, born in 1939, gained national attention
for When I Am an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple, where “Tin”
was anthologized, but remains a regional writer. Lee Smith of the
longer “Happy Memories Club,” the second act, speaks for women of more
education. Smith, born in 1944, has a substantial national reputation
and has been the recipient of many awards. A pal of esteemed memoirist
Annie Dillard, she is probably best known for the comic masterpiece Fancy Strut (1973).
In ad-libbed asides Fenner tells us she
was born in the foothills of the Poconos, and she spent much of her
life as an assistant dean’s wife in urban Syracuse, but she always
appears at home in Southern humors and rhythms. Her first narrator
speaks of going to the “thee-AY-ter.”
The “Tube Rose” of the first act is a
brand of snuff enjoyed by the narrator’s mother. Quite apart from the
general disapproval of snuff for women, we learn, it provides a kick of
sensual pleasure. In her marriage, she knew much sensuality. Her
husband Ed was so eager for sex, and kept her pregnant so often, that
she hoped the mythical saltpeter might be found to exist and
administered to him. She was relieved to grow older and allow the
“change” to escape from his clutches: “An unopened box of Kotex was my
flag of freedom.”
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Now that Ed up and died at 58, she
misses male company. Watching a sin-and-damnation minister deliver his
verbal scourges, she daydreams about what he might look like with his
clothes off. Which brings us back to the title, “Tin of Tube Rose.”
“There’s no substitute for a man,” she concludes, “but snuff—it’s a
comfort.”
The narrator of “The Happy Memories
Club” unhesitatingly prefers the company of men to anything else she
might have to do. As a resident of a “Total Retirement Community,” she
had been conducting a passionate affair with Dr. Solomon Marks, to the
scandal of her children, until his recent stroke. With the freed-up
time, she agrees to join a club for writing memoirs run by the
self-important Martha Louise Clapton. Enunciating Martha’s diphthongs
is some of the most actorly fun Fenner has all evening.
Author Smith lives in Raleigh, N.C., not
coincidentally the home turf of David Sedaris, whose mordant sense of
humor she shares. So when the narrator joins the memoir writing club
she comes up with a story of a grotesque suicide, filled with gothic
details. It is group leader Martha’s shock at these revelations that
causes her to rename the enterprise “Happy Memories Club.” In response
the narrator joyfully responds, like a lighthearted Molly Bloom,
recounting the loves of her life and the many times she said yes.
The experience gives her the two best lines of the evening, the sharp points of Widow’s Pique: “Pacemakers cannot regulate the unbridled yearnings of the heart,” and “In the end, our memories are all we have.”
The evening, sponsored by Salt City
Center in the intimate Jazz Central, 441 E. Washington St., is a
one-woman show in more than the usual senses. Fenner first found the
literary properties and then supervised their adaptation for the stage.
Both were originally first-person prose narratives, but excess
description has clearly been cut to emphasize the speaking voice. She
is also her own director, requiring a constantly shifting body set. The
narrator of “Happy Memories” actually moves more while sitting in a
wheelchair than that of “Tin of Tube Rose” in a rocking chair.
For those of us who remember her in Private Lives nearly four decades ago, Shirley Ann Fenner, like Miss Jean Brodie, is still in her prime.
This production runs through Sunday, Feb. 1. See Times Table for information.
