‘Jersey Girls’ Actress Reaches Into Her Past to Create 5 Characters for Her Solo Show

Recently, actress and solo performer Susan Van Allen was embroiled in that hallowed ritual of actresses and solo performers everywhere--updating the resume.

“All of a sudden, I paused,” Van Allen recalls, talking by phone from her San Francisco home. “I looked over what I’d done. My God, I sure hadn’t planned things this way.”

The latest entry on her resume lists “Jersey Girls,” a solo portrait of a quintet of New Jersey females, written by Van Allen in collaboration with director David Ford.

The show played at San Francisco’s Marsh Theatre in September, 1991, and is now at Theatre/Theater in Hollywood on Saturday and Sunday nights.

After the Marsh Theatre engagement, Bay Area theater critic Robert Hurwitt wrote, “Van Allen could teach most solo performers a thing or five about the craft. Not only is she an irresistibly versatile performer, but her show . . . is expertly tailored for her skills.”

Of course, Van Allen notes, she didn’t exactly plan to play leads in the traveling New Shakespeare Company in the early ‘80s after graduating from Hofstra University in Long Island, N.Y.

“While most of my college chums were waitering and waitressing in New York while looking for work, I just decided to go out to the Bay Area and ended up in this troupe.” She toured the country as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and also played in “As You Like It.”

After the Bard, Van Allen immersed herself in the Bay Area’s specialty at that time: training sessions with practicing theater artists. An actress-by-the-Bay had her choice of some of the best, ranging from Spalding Gray to Joseph Chaikin. Van Allen chose writer-performer John O’Keefe, familiar to L.A. audiences as one of the stalwart, and truly eccentric, voices at the Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival. It was a choice that, in retrospect, led directly to “Jersey Girls.”

“John’s training was very demanding vocally and physically,” she recalls. Anyone who has seen such O’Keefe adventures into the theatrical unknown as “Mimzibim” or “Barcilak’s Dream” can understand Van Allen when she says, “After running through open fields in a nun’s habit,” as she had in “Dream,” she felt she “could do anything. With lots of training behind me in different kinds of theater, I felt that I could go off and experiment on my own.”

On paper, at least, “Jersey Girls” suggests Van Allen’s ambitions. She presents us with five characters living in or visiting the sleepy coastal town of West Long Branch, N.J., which just happens to be Van Allen’s hometown, during Mother’s Day weekend.

There is Angela, the kind of teen-ager Van Allen used to envy from afar. She’s a close cousin to some of the types that pop up in the songs of Bruce Springsteen, whose own hometown of Asbury Park neighbors West Long Branch. Van Allen calls her “my mystery character, a woman when she was 12, divorced with kids when she’s 18.”

Florence, an older divorced single mom, waits tables at the local pizzeria and works extra hours to pay for daughter Mary’s First Communion dress. Van Allen, incidentally, plays both. (Observes director Ford: “Florence is very tense; things get on her nerves, and hollering takes a lot of pressure off.”)

Also in this Jersey gallery is the happy Italian housewife Thelma, perhaps the most autobiographical of Van Allen’s characters. (“My mother is named Thelma, and nothing gives her more satisfaction than, say, making a sandwich for my brother.”)

Finally, there is Joanne, Thelma’s daughter, who has fled the Jersey doldrums for San Francisco and a career. (“Although she’s a San Francisco woman, like me, she’s political and a feminist, which isn’t how I’d describe myself.”)

But ask Van Allen how she would describe herself, and she nearly draws a blank. “Um, wow . . . that’s a hard one for an actress to answer, really. I take on so many personalities, that I tend to become them , you know?” So she resorts to comparing herself to Joanne again. “She’s where I was five years ago--unable to come to terms with her extended family, resists settling down, wants to put as much distance as she can between dull hometown and the big city.”

Van Allen pauses again, realizing that she’s only indirectly talking about herself. “I’m 31; I’m married. I’m an artist. I don’t know beyond that.”

“Susan’s strength,” says Ford, “is writing the character’s voice, and doing so, she has to drop her analytical side in order to get inside the character.”

Ford, like Van Allen, has had to specialize in solo theater in a Bay Area racked with theater closings, budget cuts and ultra-reduced overhead costs. The less-is-more conditions have spawned a new wave of solo performances typified by Ford’s work with Van Allen and monologuist Josh Kornbluth, who appeared locally in October.

“While Josh is a talker,” says Ford, “Susan is a writer. When I work with Josh, he starts talking about his life and improvises some surprising and funny associations. She scripts her characters out on paper.”

Actually, on computer. Van Allen says, “I love getting up early with coffee and plunking down at the computer and mulling over these women. Really, they’re ‘girls.’ ‘Women’ is a California thing.”

After winning the San Francisco Monologue Contest in 1986, she fashioned her first solo evening, “A K A Susan Van Allen.” It was, she confesses, “a series of compact units, but I didn’t have the means of putting the units together.” Or, as critic Dennis Harvey diplomatically wrote, “The unrelated sketches didn’t gel as an evening, and their seriocomic nuances seemed under-directed.”

Enter Ford. With several of the “Jersey Girls” pieces already written in early 1991, Ford suggested structural ideas to link the pieces together. “David encouraged me to adopt what he called a ‘Rashomon’ style,” she said, referring to the classic Japanese tale that is retold from several characters’ views, “so that a few of the girls would be at the same place at the same time. It’s never obvious; you can feel the audience putting the narrative together in their minds. That’s for me the charm of the work.

“David became fascinated with true details that were revealing,” Van Allen adds, “but I worried that the show would become sad, but it’s not. My father died during Christmastime of 1990, and when I went back there this time during the holidays, I found that my mother will talk with him as if he’s there in the room with her. It’s funny, but it’s also sad; after 37 years of marriage, with her four kids out of the nest, she’s living in this big house all alone.”

Van Allen, who shared an apartment and a performance bill with actress/comic Siobhan Fallon during a 1990 Theatre/Theater run of “Triple Vision,” is openly thrilled with her pal’s joining the “Saturday Night Live” lineup and has her own East Coast dreams.

“The East Coast exiles in San Francisco seemed to love ‘Jersey Girls,’ ” she says. “It’d be great to take it back there.

Ford is taking his own collaboration with performer Bill Talen, a presidential campaign satire titled “Just Deserts with George and Jane,” to the New Hampshire hustings in February.

Van Allen muses, “It would be another way of going back home again.”