Kristin Stone as Christine Jorgenson

 

Stone begins every performance with her original portrayal of Christine Jorgenson, the first American transgender person, who created a sensation in the 1950s by traveling to Denmark for a sex-change operation and coming back as Christine instead of George Jorgenson.

Jorgenson, as Stone plays her, is not a mere sex kitten but a joyous and sensual person who wants to be taken seriously as a woman and as a human being. Her crisis is a mild one-she just wants to be a centerfold in Playboy to show how successfully feminine she is. To this end, with the audience as Playboy executives and Bunnies, she flirts, sits on men’s laps, does a lot of touching, and generally “warms up” the audience for the other performers, who will be possibly more difficult to like.

The others-five personages appear at every performance-may be any one from a list of 21 famous 20th century figures including John Dillinger, Marge Schott, Ann Landers, Tupac Shakur, Elia Kazan, and Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. The performance this reviewer attended featured Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist; Billy Carter (brother of Jimmy); film producer Julia Phillips; pianist Glenn Gould; and Brownie Wise, the woman who invented Tupperware parties as a sales gimmick.

Each performance has been researched by the actor and developed with the help of Stone and directors Lee Michael Cohn and Geoffrey Owens. Despite the breaking of the “fourth wall” with the audience, these actors stay in character and inhabit their stage space impeccably as whoever they are portraying.

Among these performances, Stone as Jorgenson and Eileen O’Connell as Brownie Wise both score high on the laugh meter, as bookends to the show. Both are very traditionally feminine in appearance and dress but quite different in attitude-while Jorgenson is all cuddles, Wise is the 1950s feminine mystique wrapped in a ball gown and pompadour, straining to sell her beloved Tupperware and the concept of women selling the cookware at home parties to their friends while perceiving that female roles are beginning to change.

“What would you (men) like to come home to?” demanded Wise at one point, attempting to get the males in the audience to agree to her vision of gender roles in marriage.

“Christine Jorgenson!” was the response of one male in the audience at the show this reviewer attended.

Leonora Gershman’s portrayal of Julia Phillips, the drug-addled producer about to be fired from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, reaches a separate level that moves from comedy-skit caricature to full one-person show deep drama within fifteen minutes. Spewing profanity and pacing the stage like a tiger in a cage, Gershman’s Phillips seemed, at the performance attended, to be emotionally jumpy from the audience interactions, deeply hurt and defensive and despite her struggles to deny her problems, she showed us a vulnerable human being trying to find exoneration.

Rick Steadman’s Glenn Gould, initially affected and detached from his audience, struggles increasingly with a quiet madness that he defends while promoting his idea for a demented opera. Molly Hagan’s Aimee McPherson is all stiff denial and self-deluding glory, while Bryan Safi’s Billy Carter is a good-natured (but just beneath the surface aggressive) good-ol’ boy slob, racist, and drinker who will never be self-aware.

Take your pick. These and other famous people are waiting to meet you for the next three Saturday nights at Fremont Center Theatre. You can debate them or silently contemplate them but you can’t hide from them. Inside Private Lives is a theatrical treat, a chance to enter not only the private lives of the celebrated but the private souls of all of us.

P.S. After the show, fill out a form and tell the company what historical characters from the 20th century you would like to see them do. I forgot to fill out my form so I nominate Jim Morrison, Lenny Bruce, Mary Miles Minter, Jack Kerouac, and Betty Friedan.

Inside Private Lives plays July 10, 17, 24 and 31, 2010 at 8 p.m. at Fremont Center Theatre, 1000 Fremont Avenue, South Pasadena, 866.811.4111.