An Actress Driven to Turn Playwright

When Shawn Schepps wants to find something to write about, she makes a list of things that bug her.

“I grew up in the ‘70s,” said the actress, “and it bugged me that nobody was talking about it. You heard about the ‘50s: ‘Happy Days,’ the ‘60s: Woodstock, the ‘40s: Bogart, the ‘30s: the Depression, the ‘20s: flappers. But it was like the ‘70s didn’t have a rap--basically because it was a really bad decade.” So Schepps wrote a revue about it--”The Stephen Weed Show” (named for Patty Hearst’s pre-SLA beau), which played for six months at Theatre/Theater in 1987-88 and went on to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

When it came time to write again, she chose another subject close to her heart: being overweight. The result is a seven-character comedy, “Conspicuous Consumption,” which opened over the weekend at the Cast.

“I never feel . . . normal in our society,” she said slowly. “You can’t hide fat. You can’t hide what we’re not supposed to be in this society. I can’t tell you how afraid I am sometimes to order dessert in a restaurant. Why is that? This play doesn’t give you answers. And we don’t get into why--when she was a child her mother fed her too much, or didn’t feed her. . . . It just says, ‘This is a picture of somebody who doesn’t fit in. Look at it.’ ”

In the story, Sarah (played by Schepps) is as much a victim of a soulless “fix-it” society as she is of her own destructive impulses: “She gets her jaw wired, does speed, goes to diet counselors, gets her ear stapled. Everybody’s willing to help you, to take your money--whether it’s for coke or alcohol or food. Everybody has a way to help you, so you can be perfect, so you can be ‘the best you can be.’ I know they’re not all quacks, but. . . .”

Schepps, 28, is emphatic that the story not be construed as her own. “This is not some autobiographical vomiting,” said the locally born writer. “The truth is, the first two drafts of the play were autobiographical. I looked at them and thought, ‘How boring. How self-indulgent.’ I hate that. So I took out the parents, the boyfriends, best friend: all the people in my life. And it became about people I observed.”

The playwright is further distanced from her stage character in her choice of men: Sarah has an unhealthy relationship with the “unkind” Guy; Schepps lives with the play’s director, Toby Reisz, “the sweetest guy in the world. Smart--and kind. Very kind.” She paused. “I never went through half the things this character does. But I know (that mania) exists. And it’s not something that’s explored. Even talking about it is taboo.”

With that, she also hopes to bring some levity to a generally dark subject. “The play is a downer at the end, but it’s also very funny. I like to get people laughing, give them a really good time, then come in with the punches. I wanted to show how people like me think. But I rewrote it because I didn’t want it just to be a fat girl’s troubles--and I didn’t want it to be about me: me, me, me. It’s about anybody who feels bad about themselves.”

(Originally, Schepps had decided to further take the focus off herself by not appearing in the piece--till the actress she had hired dropped out at the last moment. “In the middle of the reading, I thought, ‘Hey, I like this. This is really good. I was insane to pass this up.’ ”)

Schepps began acting professionally at 9, when a talent agent saw her in an ANTA Academy Christmas show and asked if she would like to do commercials. “I said, ‘Oh please, yes.’ She said with a smile. “I was a precocious little thing--and I had a natural affinity for it. Sometimes I wish there was something else I wanted to do.” She worked steadily until she was 13, took a break, then came back to it at 18. “It was time,” she said simply.

Though she’s recently ventured into screen writing (the as-yet-unproduced “Behind the Orange Curtain”), Schepps retains an affinity for theater: “With a screenplay, you have to go from A to B. It has to make sense. There has to be a first, second, and third act. And I love that structure. But there’s a life on the stage that’s different from film. On stage you can do anything; you can create any world you want.”

In future work, Schepps plans to stay off the beaten path. “I really want to expose things that haven’t been exposed,” she said. “How many more plays are there going to be in a living room about a family that has a crisis and comes together? I mean, that’s not me. I hate it when you come out of theater, go home, turn on the TV and see the same thing there. Theater is not supposed to be like a commercial. It’s supposed to be an adventure.”