Tourists

In 1988, Katherine Shepard, the actress who played Charlotte, the ever-so-elegant lesbian mother, in Blood, commissioned me to write a short piece that she could perform at the International Conference on Semantics to be held at Yale. I wrote a 15-minute comedy called Tourists for her. In it, she played an archaeologist researching an ancient pyramid in Central America and trying to explain her findings to a bewildered Midwestern housewife visiting the pyramid on a cruise. Later, in Portland, I met an actress named Leigh Clark, who had the uncanny ability to transform herself into different characters in front of your eyes. For Leigh, I expanded the number of tourists in Tourists to four: Bertha Johnson, the Midwestern housewife; Dr. Elizabeth Robbins, the archaeologist; Florine-Mae Rigby, a flighty Southern girl planning her wedding; and Naomi Schwartz, a New Age bank teller from Brooklyn. In 1991 Leigh gave an astonishingly brilliant performance at the Portland Civic Theatre—and nothing of it survives except one cassette tape recording with awful sound quality. Six years later, I turned Tourists into a two-woman show for two wonderful Portland actresses, Wendy Westerwelle and Vana O’Brien. Produced by Cygnet Productions in 1997, the show enjoyed a sold-out run. And I don’t have a single photo to show you.