Champagne’s Plays Probe Everyday Experiences

People say her work is “quirky, delicate and elusive.” The same might be said of playwright Susan Champagne. A 26-year-old gamine with short red hair, a shorter denim skirt and purple hose, Champagne is a longtime member of the Padua Hills Playwright’s Festival--whose first entry this year is her “Honeymoon” (at the Actors Center Theatre Wing through May 15).

“It’s a comic tale about a young woman who’s abandoned on her honeymoon,” she explained. “The husband doesn’t dump her--he just keeps going away: bowling, fishing with his best friend. He’s also sent their furniture to the wrong address, so she hardly has any food or money--and no furniture except a table and a couple of chairs. The play begins with her meeting Mary, an older upstairs neighbor. Mary has a really difficult (marital) situation but covers it up by talking about her excellence as a wife, her ability to cook and clean.”

Champagne (who toils by day in the royalties department at Samuel French bookstore) drew many of the characterizations from her own one-year stay in Waltham, Mass., where she was attending graduate school. “I lived in this great, really funky place,” she reminisced. “I had a neighbor like Mary; she was older and very cheerful, ‘Miss Home Welcoming Committee.’ I lived there an entire year without knowing that she and her husband were having these huge arguments every night while I was at work. Also in the apartment there was a pregnant woman, and she and her boyfriend were always having fights, throwing furniture around.

“Then they moved out and another pregnant woman and her boyfriend moved in and had fights. Then there was this guy next door--I don’t know what drug he was on--and he had this prostitute-looking girlfriend. Downstairs there was a man and a woman. One day, the woman’s ex-boyfriend came and cut all the phone lines, so we didn’t have phones for a while. And down the street there was this crazy alcoholic woman who’d walk around talking to herself in Italian, or yelling at her husband while he was gardening. It was a real hotbed of weird domestic scenes. Not that it was funny. It’s just that it was so extreme . . . that it was funny.”

Within “Honeymoon,” however, dwells a heartfelt message. “This is about people putting too much pressure on themselves because of expectations: drawing from the ideas of a popular culture, instead of drawing from their own feelings. They’re unable to communicate because they’re so afraid of being vulnerable, exposing their true selves, their pain, weakness, fear of being judged. But I admire their perseverance--and this is not a grim story. By the end, the young couple has made a step toward facing each other truthfully.”

The playwright admits that her own life (and the lives she observes) has often fed her work: “I used to write stories when I was a little, little girl--then I thought ‘This is stupid,’ so I stopped doing it. But I’ve always been very curious, very sensitive to my environment. I get whole stories from small experiences that touch me.”

The Fairfax-area apartment she now inhabits has inspired her new “earthquake” play, “6.0.” And last year’s award-winning “Take a Picture” (at the Boyd Street) had its origins in a trip to Ensenada--and an encounter with a particularly friendly couple in the bar. “We really did meet them,” she said shyly. “Though (contrary to the play) we didn’t go back to their room. But the other things happened--his asking me, ‘Aren’t you about a 34B?,’ while she just went on, pretending he didn’t say anything. They asked us what we were doing later, and when we said ‘midnight Mass,’ they canceled the drinks they’d bought us and left.”

Champagne giggled at the memory. Since 1981, her work numbers “five or six plays--if you count the good ones. When I started, my writing wasn’t really place-oriented; it was much more scattered. It was fun, experimental, but not true.” Champagne gives credit to “great” teachers at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., the encouragement of fellow Padua Hills writers--and of course, a perennially interesting vantage point. “There are cultural things that make people behave differently (across the country),” she emphasized. “New England has a wonderful familial thing. But I also love California: I feel comfortable here, less judged. And certainly, people are strange everywhere.”