STAGE REVIEWS : Opening Women’s Fest Bill Scrutinizes Past

The twin bill that launched the weeklong National Women’s Theatre Festival at UCLA’s Ralph Freud Playhouse Friday was profoundly emblematic of the festival’s overall aim: to help women, as society’s outcasts, to reframe the emotional territory and, as society’s outlaws, to reclaim it.

Featured were poor-little-rich-girl Joan Hotchkis in “Tearsheets” (subtitle: “Letters I Didn’t Send Home”) and San Francisco’s Canyon Sam in “The Dissident,” chronicling a Chinese-American woman’s attempt to go back to her roots, if only she could find them.

Started in Philadelphia three years ago as an instrument of empowerment, the festival’s success encouraged Executive Producer Katie Goodman to expand it to Los Angeles. Both opening-night programs scrutinized the past as a way to understanding self-- woman self--in the present.

Sam is the American trying to connect with “her people,” in particular the women she meets in travels to China and Tibet, and Hotchkis is the WASP growing up in a world that treated its women as it did its Mexican laborers and its cattle--firmly and in clearly distanced and defined roles.

The Hotchkis piece is as biting sociologically as it is artistically. Developed for the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, it is a mature dissection of the politics of wealth, race and gender by an actress who knows her way around a stage.

In front of an arrangement of draped bedsheets and curtains, she delivers snapshots and tantalizing snatches of early Southern California history tartly juxtaposed with the concealed injustices, tyrannies and male assumptions of authority in the ranching dynasty into which she was born. The Bixbys and Hotchkises had connections to the railroad Huntingtons. We are talking money and power, and women as serfs to male economic giants.

There is fire in the writing and blood and guts in the performance. Hotchkis deals openly with her body (less important, in her mother’s view, than a man’s pride), her menses (a long scarlet ribbon is a soiled sanitary napkin, a harness, a strangling rope), her marriage (a twisting filmy drape emulates stifling white-on-whiteness).

Part reminiscence, part expose, the piece ends with a striking analogy between the castration of bulls and the removal of a benign tumor from her brain (“I eat my fear as fasting monks eat air. . . . Something was removed and my eyes do not close”).

In contrast to this heightened theatricality, Canyon Sam’s account of her pilgrimage to Asia was almost naive. The simplicity of the approach betrayed youth and innocence but had the charm of both.

Alone on stage with a chair and a few empty pails, her “Dissident” is a storyteller’s account of alien cultures seen by someone who can’t connect with her ancestors but who finds women along the way who enlighten her journey.

The intimacy of the piece begged for something smaller than the Freud Playhouse (which occasionally swallowed up words), but the mix of ingenuousness, doubt, disappointment, curiosity, integrity and courage took us into the deepest Asia of Sam’s soul.

* National Women’s Theatre Festival, UCLA, Freud Playhouse, MacGowan Hall, Westwood. Wednesday: “This Is My Body, This Is My Home” / “Abundance” (Madres). Thursday: Adilah Barnes; Nobuko Miyamoto; Theresa Chavez. Friday: choreographer Rachel Van Dessel; Anna Brown; Betty Gonzalez Nash; Diviana Ingravallo; Julie Laffin. Saturday: Deb Margolin; Monica Palacios; Roberta Kastelic; Jennifer Vally & the Urban Pioneers. All shows 8 p.m. $12; (310) 825-2101.