PHOTOS
Alicia Grega-Pikul
Set in an apartment above “the typical Northeast Pennsylvania beer garden” circa 1974, Mark Zdancewicz’s new play doesn’t call for glamour. Transforming the elegant Arts YOUniverse stage for this weekend’s performances was a feat requiring hand-built plastic floral arrangements, a small fortune spent on eBay.
“I wanted to make the place look really tacky. But what can you do when it looks like an English Country Manor?” the playwright said with a laugh at a dress rehearsal for
Conversations With My Dead Sister on Monday. Among Zdancewicz’s other scripts are
Cubes and
Finding Miss Kubelick.
Written with actresses Rebecca Schmidt and Kathleen Godwin in mind, Zdancewicz chose the era because that’s when his two real-life aunts that inspired the story would have been in their 40s. Schmidt plays Fran while Godwin plays Viv.
The dirty laundry aired in
Conversations With My Dead Sister is personal, but the nostalgic stories will ring familiar with audiences for its local themes. Their history is one of any number of immigrant families struggling through hard times in an unspecified Northeastern Pennsylvania town. The scent of Zdancewicz’s grandmother’s Polish Babka recipe — which Viv scarfs down early in the play — is likely to spark memories in the audience.
“It’s a thick potato pancake — grated potatoes, onions, salt, pepper, heavy cream and two pounds of fatback, which is like fat from the back of the pig,” said Zdancewicz. “So this is not a healthy dish by any means, but it was so good.”
The apartment is Fran’s. Fran, the smart one, runs the tavern and has lived pretty much the same since she and Viv — the pretty one — had a falling out seven years ago. Viv had been living in Florida with husband LeRoy. It’s the morning after Mama Cass died that Viv arrives unannounced and unwelcome while Fran is venting her frustrations via vacuum.
In matters of life and death, unlike golf, there are no mulligans, but theater grants us the gift of reimagining the past. In real life, one of Zdanzewicz’s aunts died before there could be a reconciliation. The play wonders what might have happened if the conversation had taken place without succumbing to warm fuzziness.
“Sisters know how to push each other’s buttons. They know exactly what to say and what to dredge up, to pick at what will really irritate the other one,” Schmidt said from personal experience. Coincidently, both actresses are the middle child in sets of three sisters.
“When I was younger, playing a part like this would have frightened me. But this is a character,” Godwin said. “I’m almost embarrassed that I can play her. I hope people don’t think, ‘Oh she knows what it’s like to walk around half-soused.’ It takes work to learn how to do that — how to be bitchy and crass and just let it come out of your mouth.”
“At the same time, the world they live in is just these words,” Schmidt followed. “They don’t step outside that. So you have to take that and make that the best — squeeze the most out of it you can without making it look like you’re squeezing.”
VIDEO: Arts writer Alicia Grega chats with actresses Rebecca Schmidt (Fran) and Kathleen Godwin (Viv), and playwright Mark Zdancewicz at a dress rehearsal for the world premiere of Conversations with My Dead Sister, running Friday, June 26-Sunday, June 27 at Arts YOUniverse in Wilkes-Barre, PA.
ADDITIONAL VIDEOS: Watch short preview scenes from the performance.
Viv tells the Harpoon Story
Fran's Consumer Activist Letters
The Story About Aunt Mary