Her First Play Comes to Life

Carolyn Carpenter went through an artistic rite of passage Thursday night as she watched the premiere of her first full-length play, “Six Random Women and the Voice of a Man.”

Nobody said “break a leg” while she marked time before the lights went down at Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana, but some of the greetings she got would, to an outsider, seem just as oddly backhanded.

“You put makeup on!” Patricia L. Terry, ART’s artistic director, exclaimed while giving Carpenter a hello hug. “We haven’t seen her with makeup on in a long time.”

“You look too good. You should be just wan,” Sally Leonard said from her perch at the ticket booth outside the 82-seat performing space in downtown Santa Ana.

Yes, it’s a pressure-filled, taxing thing, a playwright’s first production. But enough to make a person wan?

Staffers at the close-knit ART, Carpenter’s artistic home since 1995 as an actress, associate producer, and now playwright, know her case is special. For the past five months, while sweating to give stage-worthy form to “Six Random Women,” Carpenter has had to meet an even greater challenge: giving a good start in life to one specific baby: Davis, her first child.

“New mother, playwright. Priorities. Makeup comes pretty low,” she said with telegraphic brevity befitting the author of “Three Little Words,” a tartly comical episode within her play in which nobody is able to utter more than three words at a time.

Carpenter’s labors have produced a knee-high pile of rewrites, stacked neatly at the bottom of a bookcase in the Anaheim home she shares with Davis and her rock musician husband, David.

“It’s bigger than you!” she cooed, cradling her chubby-cheeked infant, who seems to get perturbed only when hungry. Carpenter also has a calmness about her, a self-contained, straightforward and serious manner devoid of theatricality. She speaks in an even alto; smiles flicker on her face, coming and going like the sun on a partly cloudy day.

Nursing time for Davis has been the best time to work on her play, Carpenter says. He likes to leisurely nuzzle while she sits at her computer and writes. The writing hasn’t been so leisurely.

Within a week of her son’s birth on the Fourth of July, Carpenter learned there was a glitch in ART’s bid for the performing rights to its planned season opener, Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.” Her play might have to be moved up from November to September to take its place. She worked furiously on a two-week deadline to turn the 10-minute playlet that had first intrigued Terry into a full-length second act.

“There were some pretty serious peaks and valleys that first month [after she gave birth],” Carpenter said. As it turned out, “Three Tall Women” became available, and “Six Random Women” was slotted as planned on the ART schedule. As part of ART’s new mission to produce at least one new work each season, it joins a roster of works by celebrated playwrights, including Albee, Eugene O’Neill and Athol Fugard.

Carpenter may be a fledgling playwright, but at 36 she is virtually a lifetime trouper versed in many facets of the stage. She spent her early years traveling with carnivals, where her father, theatrical makeup expert Robin Stevens, made a living staging house-of-horrors attractions.

Her first gig, at age 5, was shepherding squeamish fair-goers through “The Disconnected Lady,” an exhibit in which an accident victim’s severed head and scattered body parts were supposedly being kept alive by artificial means. Knowing that the severed head and detached torso were actually her two older brothers, little Carolyn wasn’t a bit horrified.

Stevens settled down as a high school drama teacher in Lakeside in San Diego County. His daughter grew up being cast in child roles in musicals he directed. In high school she took his drama classes and learned to prepare thoroughly for auditions because her dad wasn’t about to be accused of nepotism.

From watching and working with her father, Carpenter learned how plays are staged. “I’ve seen it from every point of view,” she said. “No matter which job, he instilled in me what it is to be aware of the big picture.”

In 1988 she got a job doing the cancan for 30 shows a week in an Old West saloon revue at Knott’s Berry Farm. Then, in 1991, a car wreck on the Santa Ana Freeway left her with a damaged lower back; her days as a professional dancer were finished. She says she still has dreams in which she dances the cancan. She awakens and feels sad at the loss.

It took three years for Carpenter to recover from her injury. Early on, she turned to writing plays, a long forgotten hobby, as a way to cope and fill her time. Her first script, about her medical and legal experiences after the accident, was called “Scum of the Earth.”

She came to ART as an actress in 1995, taking key roles in a Christmas play, “Kringle’s Window,” and in an unorthodox production of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.” She also acted in small Los Angeles theaters and joined a Hollywood-based playwrights’ circle called Rewrites, which she continues to use as a nurturing ground for her work.

Her day job the past four years has been reading film scripts for studios and agents; working from home, she writes the equivalent of a review on each one. A tough critic, Carpenter says that of the more than 600 screenplays she has read, she has recommended only 5% as good candidates for production.

One agent wanted her to write one or two word summations. “I was writing things like ‘lame’ and ‘trite,’ and after six months I realized, ‘He’s sending them back to the writers with the script.’ I was mortified. What good was that?” Carpenter began writing longer, constructively critical comments, no matter how flawed the script.

When she reads this week’s newspapers, she will face reviews of a play she considers a work in progress. The first act is a series of short scenes and monologues; the second a separate look at five runners-up in a “Miss America”-type beauty contest and the older woman who tends to them backstage.

The genesis of “Six Random Women,” Carpenter said, was her frustration at auditioning for roles in grass-roots theaters where there was a glut of anxious actresses competing for too few parts. As a drama student at San Diego State, it drove her to audition openly as a female Jet in a production of “West Side Story,” and surreptitiously as a male Jet. She landed both parts and had to fess up.

“The director, bless his heart, was so proud I did that, he was all choked up.”

Carpenter and Terry readily acknowledge that finding a connecting theme for the segments that make up “Six Random Women” has been a challenge and that they could have used more time to meet it.

One unifying strand is the sharp, vinegary taste of Carpenter’s humor. Another is the play’s glimpse of various women coping with how to be themselves--or to be other selves they would prefer.

“Since Day One, [Carpenter] has been saying, ‘Let’s keep the cheese element out,’ ” Terry said. “She wants to stay away from a typical play about women,” in which the characters are defined by feminine softness or by their relationships with men.

Carpenter’s grasp of the big picture is a quality vital to her work as ART’s associate producer, a job that includes creative input as well as such nuts-and-bolts tasks as setting work schedules, and, on the night of her premiere, fetching a wastebasket to put in the lobby.

She and Terry agree that her producer’s overview helped her through significant cutting and editing that might have been hard for the playwright in her to stomach. For instance, director and author mutually decided two nights before the play opened to drop one long scene that wasn’t working.

“It’s very nurturing, about the best situation you could have for this kind of thing,” Carpenter said of the chance to refine her first play at a theater where she is part of the family (although nobody at ART calls her Carolyn; she’s Arilyn, the stage name she adopted when she joined the Screen Actors Guild. Carolyn Carpenter and Carolyn Stevens were taken, so with no duplicates allowed under union rules, she chose Arilyn).

Some 35 playgoers, several of them students in a drama class at Irvine Valley College, attended Thursday’s first staging of “Six Random Women.” It was one of two discount-priced preview performances that Terry and Carpenter would scrutinize for possible last-minute changes before Saturday’s sold-out official opening.

Carpenter sat in the back row--which in ART’s cozy space is the third row. She chewed gum steadily--something she says is not her usual habit. One piece of gum lasted the two-hour evening. She chuckled frequently through the first act, deeply enjoying the actors’ performances.

The audience laughed too. These were, for the most part, Carpenter’s older, well-tested bits, some of them with track records as finalists in various contests for short plays. Going in, she was less sure about the second act, the freshly written, extended one about the beauty queens. She watched it intensely, taking mental notes rather than simply taking in the performance.

When the play was over, Carpenter felt reassured in some ways, still uncertain in others.

“The characters ended up being much more likable than I imagined,” she said. “The actors did a nice job of finding what each character’s vulnerability is. I was afraid the whole evening would be too negative, and I don’t feel that way now.”

She wants to rework and reinstate the scene that got dropped, then offer “Six Random Women” to San Diego State’s drama department in support of a scholarship fund memorializing Mack Owen, one of her teachers there. After that, it’s hard to say. Screenwriting is her main ambition, but she wants to stay grounded in theater as well.

Carpenter says her main worry about the ART production of “Six Random Women” is that its 18-performance run will not be successful for the company that put its faith in her work.

“I also go through my own personal insecurities,” she said. “That as a playwright I won’t have any weight, or I’ll have a voice that is whiny. I go back and forth whether I want this play to [define] my voice. I have others in my head. I’m a pretty young playwright, and I’m still grappling with what my message and what my voice is.”

“Six Random Women and the Voice of a Man,” by Carolyn Carpenter. Through Dec. 11 at Alternative Repertory Theatre, 125B N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m. $22-$25. (714) 836-7929.