Playwright Examines Mother’s Life of Privilege and Oppression

“I was brought up to be a different kind of woman than I turned out to be,” explained actress Joan Hotchkis, whose solo performance work “Tearsheets: Letters I Didn’t Send Home,” opens this weekend at Highways in Santa Monica. “To do this piece, I had to break down some very strong taboos: that women should stay in their place, be inconspicuous, silent. So for me, it’s like coming out--on the page and on the stage.”

Hotchkis’ story is rooted in the history of her mother’s family, the ultra-wealthy Bixbys of Long Beach, whose cattle ranch, Rancho Los Alamitos, originally totaled 26,000 acres. (It was later whittled down to 7,800 acres, then 3,700. Today, Cal State Long Beach sits on what used to be her grandfather’s barley fields.) “When I was a kid growing up in Pasadena,” the actress said, “we visited his ranch almost every weekend. I think of it as my spiritual home.”

Hotchkis contrasts that natural environment--”the fecundity, the lushness, the wild animals, the great food”--with the more restrictive and oppressive influences she felt as a woman growing up in a time and place so defined by rich, powerful men. In “Tearsheets,” she compares the raising of cattle to the raising of women: “In a sense, women are made property--tied up with patriarchal obligations and branded Mrs. So-and-So.”

Although always dramatic as a child--Hotchkis recalls “being paid a penny a minute to keep quiet--I think the most I ever earned was a nickel”--she dutifully embarked on a more traditional route. She graduated from Smith College, earning her teaching credential, and teaching nursery school for three years. “I didn’t have the courage to go into acting till I was 26 or 27,” she said with a sigh. “It seemed like such a daring thing to do.”

Roles in regional theater, off-Broadway, Broadway, and television (in New York, she starred on the soap “Secret Storm” for two years) followed, as did marriage and a daughter. After her divorce in the late ‘60s, Hotchkis moved to Los Angeles, where her TV work included a stint opposite William Windom in “My World and Welcome to It,” and as Jack Klugman’s doctor-girlfriend Nancy Cunningham on “The Odd Couple.”

Then, 20 years ago, she found a diary written by her mother in 1912. “I was fascinated by her view of that culture,” Hotchkis said. “Suddenly it became an obsession. I interviewed my mother and her sister, and started digging up all the material I could find: maps, journals, deeds, accounting books, photographs.” The result, the Joan Hotchkis Collection of Bixby Family Papers, is housed in the Special Collections exhibit on the Cal State Long Beach campus.

“I tried to write a history of the family, but I’m not a historian,” she said. “I’m a dramatist, an actor, a poet. The more I wrote, the more it kept wanting to go in a dramatic form. I’d give lectures on women’s studies, but it’s not my medium.” It wasn’t until a year ago, when she took a workshop with performance artist Tim Miller, that Hotchkis found the confidence and voice to tell her story--through a blend of metaphor and image, movement and photographs.

The actress, who wrote and starred in the well-received 1975 film “Legacy,” refers to this piece as “sort of a spoken blues.”

“We’re not dealing with naturalistic theater here,” said director Steven Kent, founder and artistic director of Los Angeles’ famed Company Theatre of the ‘70s. “Joan plays her mother and father, her grandfather, a cow. The set is kind of an extension of her costume--a white series of fabrics--and we project onto it and onto the set. You can’t really tell where anything stops; the boundaries are all mixed up, and props are used in all different ways.”

Kent, who directed Jo Carson’s “Daytrips” last year at Los Angeles Theatre Center, has known Hotchkis for many years and says that although her character is at the center of the story, “It’s not really about her as much as the effects of the white, rich, powerful, landowning men on our culture, and specifically on women. Also, this land was once owned by Indians. So it’s about Joan herself--trying to make a life for herself in New York and Hollywood--and all these different cultures. It’s a fascinating soup.”

“Tearsheets” plays at 8:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Sunday (scheduled to close Nov. 24) at Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St. in Santa Monica. Tickets are $10. (213) 453-1755.