A universal nerve
‘Now That She’s Gone’ touches on territory familiar to us all
By Leigh Kennicott 05/20/2010
With so much anger and ideological babble passing for legitimate discourse these days, it’s difficult to remember a time when great ideas could actually find an audience. But Pasadena Weekly columnist Ellen Snortland has in “Now That She’s Gone,” a solo show embodying that rare time of hope and transition during which women began to come into their own.
Now enjoying a reprise at the Missing Piece Theatre in Burbank, the production features artifacts from the life of Barbro Snortland, Ellen’s mother, tracing the fight for women’s rights through most of the 20th century while unraveling a potent family mystery. It is also an exploration of a discovery that all sons and daughters’ must take — that their parents are people too. Why that should be such a revelation is, in itself, a mystery of human life. But Snortland softens the blow with comfortable humor and wise insight.
The award-winning production is a simple affair. The narrative opens by the deathbed of Barbro. Through her recollections, Ellen interweaves the 30 articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document championed by Eleanor Roosevelt. When Ellen was a child, her mother handed over the declaration to augment a report on the Declaration of Independence. Its precepts helped direct her daughter’s life from that moment on. There were a few digressions — fame, drugs and several marriages, along with literary recognition. And Ellen’s relationship with her mother was one fraught with turmoil.
This precipitated a working-through process that is something that most sons and daughters experience. The glacial reserve in Ellen’s family was so hard to penetrate that, at one point, she chases her mother down the street with a pair of brass candlesticks. And when she can get a reaction, she rates it as merely a “ripple in the fjord.”
Family experiences — a botched abortion back in the ’30s, unwanted children and distant marriages — help shape Ellen’s life, which comes to be devoted as much to a search for self as a realization that all women are indeed “The Second Sex.” Ellen’s focus shifts from the particular to the universal before settling on the particular cause of her family’s discontent. It is a revelation that will resonate with and contribute to similar realizations within any family. n
“Now That She’s Gone” is at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Missing Piece Theatre, 2811 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. Tickets are $20 and available at brownpapertickets.com/event/102637. The show will also be performed at the Hollywood Fringe Festival June 27 at the Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Visit hollywoodfringe.org/project/view/224
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My description of my relationship with my mom has always been "It's Complicated." One of the blessings of getting older and wiser is that you can see your parents with new eyes. I loved this one woman show because I saw my complicated relationship with my mom in her story. I laughed and cried. Isn't that what good theatre does? It allows us to see the universal in one person's experience. Now That She's Gone does that and entertains at the same time. Don't miss it!