A Private Pain--and a Public Healing

Soon, the houselights would dim, and Darci Picoult, alone onstage, would start discussing her most intimate body parts and functions. Backstage, she asked herself, “Are you crazy?”

It was fall, 1991, and Picoult, a New York actress, was presenting her one-woman play, “My Virginia,” for the first time. Later--as she saw that people weren’t walking out--it would get easier.

“My Virginia” is not traditional theater, nor Picoult your ordinary playwright.

This, her first play--alternately hilarious and heartbreaking--is about diethylstilbestrol, or DES, a drug widely prescribed before 1971 to prevent miscarriage. It didn’t, it turned out, but it does cause cancer and other reproductive system aberrations in DES-exposed daughters.

Picoult, 37, is a DES daughter.

Recently, L.A. Theatre Works brought “My Virginia” to Santa Monica, where it was recorded for broadcast this summer on KCRW’s ‘The Play’s the Thing.”

It is a riveting, 90-minute tour de force, in which Picoult plays herself, her “Why me?” Jewish mother, patronizing doctors, pushy drug company lawyers and assorted others.

It begins “at the beginning.” She is born.

Sitting cross-legged in a big rattan chair on a nearly bare stage, she tells how her mom, having miscarried twice, “took this drug, DES, to ensure healthy, fat babies.” Darci and Darri were tiny preemie twins.

Jump to age 11. Each twin, desperate to be first to menstruate, regularly searches her body for signs of puberty. One day, Darci, triumphant, finds “a little hair on my virginia ,” her childish name for that place down there.

A year later, counting hairs, she “noticed this strange black thing . . . a thingamajigee on my thingamajigee.” It was melanoma, her first medical trauma.

Coming to grips with the issue as a young adult, Picoult wants to tell the world about DES daughters. She decides to write a screenplay.

Enter the film producer, also played by Picoult: “A film about DES? Where is the humor? . . . Can you throw in a love interest?”

Next stop: A conference of DES-exposed women. Onstage, she describes “beautiful women in their 20s and 30s, all of whom had deformed genitals or reproductive organs, and some none at all.”

For a year, she listened to their stories, interviewed their doctors, mothers, lawyers. Then she wrote “My Virginia.” Her tragi-heroine, “Julie,” is a fictional composite of these women.

Julie, 22, has a Texas drawl--done impeccably by Picoult--a teaching job and an embalmer bridegroom. “While I was teachin’ the young ones, Dan was buryin’ the old ones.”

Julie also has cancer. When she recoils at her OB-GYN’s suggestion that he take out her vagina, he says: “Look at me. I’m in my 50s, and I have lived my whole life without one.”

She has the surgery. Later, she files suit against the companies that marketed DES. Their lawyers pry into everything from her sex life to what makeup she uses. She says: “I can’t help thinkin’, if mascara is linked to vaginal cancer, then we are all in big trouble.”

Julie gets a settlement and, not long afterward, a grim diagnosis. The cancer has spread. Her husband selects her casket. She is 34.

When DES was identified as a killer 20-plus years ago, it made headlines. But soon it became yesterday’s problem. DES daughters have to fight to be heard, to get research funded.

As a doctor in the play says, “No one is going to win a Nobel Prize monitoring a 30-year-old medical mistake.”

In an interview, Picoult speaks of her play as “a healing for me and my mother.” As with many DES mothers and daughters, there was anger and guilt.

She has performed for audiences of doctors for whom, she says, “it must be like Hollywood-types going to see ‘The Player.’ ” But they come and they listen.

Married two years, Picoult is weighing whether to have children. She has not had cancer, but a history of minor surgeries and biopsies. “I’m always having a lump here, a lump there.”

She’s negotiating either a TV dramatization or a one-person film. In October, she’ll do “My Virginia” in Brussels for the European Community of Doctors.

DES Action USA estimates that 5 million women took DES. Most of their children are unaware that they were exposed. One in 1,000 daughters can expect to develop clear cell cancer; the jury’s still out on the risk to sons.

Nora Cody, DES Action director, has seen “My Virginia” three times and “wept every time.” She found it “very emotionally accessible. She packs in a lot of information in a friendly way.”

Margaret Lee Braun, director of DES Cancer Network and herself a DES daughter who developed cancer, assisted Picoult. She calls the play “vivid and true and funny and terrible. . . . She caught the humor we use to cope with living.”

And, she adds, the “almost science-fiction-like horror” of having this done to you by your loving mother.

DES Action USA is based in Oakland: (510) 465-4011. DES Cancer Network is in Rochester, N.Y.: (716) 473-6119.

The Age of Renaissance

It was SRO at the UCLA conference, “Dressing the Renaissance Woman,” wherein scholars sought to explain it all: all those sleeves, all that brocade, all those plunging bodices.

Who was this woman? Well, if she was upper-class, she was most likely an exquisitely gowned ornament. In 16th-Century Venice, one speaker noted, beautiful women were trotted out as a “decorative border” at state occasions (the participants being, by definition, male).

And, it seems, Renaissance woman rarely owned her finery. Her wedding gown probably cost a fortune--family honor was at stake--but it was apt to be pawned after a decent interval to pay taxes. Just as her jewels might be seized by her husband’s creditors.

That was reality. Fantasy is--well, Mela Hoyt-Heydon of the Fullerton College theater department will tell you about fantasy. She was the wrap-up speaker at the conference, sponsored by UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Center for the Study of Women.

Her topic: “Renaissance Dress and the Entertainment Industry: Fiction With a Touch of Fact.”

When it comes to costumes for films and stage, she says, “if you’re looking for authenticity, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

First, costume designers must face the fact that “modern actresses are not used to being corseted, wearing long, hanging sleeves, wigs and large hats.” They must be able to “act, sing, cry and even die in these clothes.”

Designers may spend hours studying Titians or Tintorettos in museums, but ultimately, Hoyt-Heydon says, authenticity is compromised by budget, script and modern ideas of beauty.

A Renaissance neck ruff must be scaled down so as not to appear laughable in a big screen close-up, where an actor might “look like (his) head is on a platter.”

Costumer and set designer must click, too, to ensure that “Juliet dressed in burgundy is not sitting upon a burgundy bed against a burgundy-draped wall. . . .”

Finally, Hoyt-Heydon says, a designer is not simply “unfreezing a moment” from centuries ago, but creating a mood and feeling of the past, with poetic license. (A case in point: Today’s bride traditionally wears white. Not so during the Renaissance. So how to dress Kate in “The Taming of the Shrew”?)

Hoyt-Heydon is also a free-lance costume designer who has created for light opera, musical comedy and cruise lines. And, she mentions in passing, she put the Chicken McNuggets in tutus for TV: “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.