Interview: Kimberly Demmary of SHE at Elite Theatre Company

Kimberly Demmary is a talented playwright and actress who has had a number of plays make their debuts on Ventura County stages. Her latest is SHE, an anthology of four stories that all take place in a Victorian house in San Francisco. The story deals with four women who live there in the 1960's, 1990's, 2002, and present-day. While not knowing each other personally, the four are connected through the house and their experiences, each dealing with her own demons, relationships, reflections, and newfound strength. We spoke with Kimberly about the creative process she undergoes in writing her plays as well as something about the stories in this particular production. SHE plays through Sunday, June 16 at the Elite Theatre Company in Oxnard.

VCOS: As a writer myself, I know how it is to face a blank page, but my work is non-fiction so I always have something concrete to build on. Fiction writers like yourself really work from a blank page. How does it work with a writer like you? What inspires you? Do you have to go to a special place to get inspiration is it just a lightning bolt of creativity that strikes you?

KIMBERLY: It's a lightning bolt. It usually starts with something random, like a title will pop into my head, or I'll be listening to a song and a certain lyric will come up and something will flash in my brain. That's how most of my plays have worked. Usually it's a title. In this play, SHE, I went to an antique store and I bought a really old music box and that inspired one of the vignettes. I found out it was made in San Francisco so I built a whole story around that. Another one of the vignettes is called "French Women Don't Fart." I wrote the story based off of when I was walking by a friend's desk and she was reading something and I saw the title, "French women don't..." something, and someday I should find out what the real title was but for some reason I thought the word was "fart" and I thought that was so funny so I wrote a whole play on that. So it's usually the lightning bolts that do it. The hard part is when I just sit down and concentrate and write it.

VCOS: How did you link these four disparate stories together?

KIMBERLY: The music box one, which is called The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. V, and French Women Don't Fart were both fairly long but not long enough to be stand-alone plays. So I always wanted to put them together because they're sweet and charming and both have good messages. But on their own they don't make a full play. Then I also had Half a Life and Ashes to Ashes that were really small vignettes for one-act festivals that I wanted to try my hand at. So I expanded those a little bit and decided to put all four of them together. They are all women-strong plays and fit. I just built a house around them and they fit together. It's crazy. They were all meant to go together but I didn't know that.

VCOS: How many plays does this make for you?

KIMBERLY: Six or seven are finished. Several are not.

VCOS: Are they all an outgrowth of something within you or are some of them unrelated to your own experiences, just flights of fancy?

KIMBERLY: Yeah. I have never done the things that these women have done (laughs). Those are flights of fancy for sure. I have a very vivid imagination. something you have to have if you want to be a writer. I don't know, I'm feeling a little more free now, being able to explore more unconventional, strange situations. It's been really a lot of fun lately.

VCOS: When I read the summary of your story it brought to mind a movie from the '60s called The Yellow Rolls Royce, which was about an automobile and its generation of owners. I kept that in mind when I wrote a book, using the same idea, about an old record store and the various owners that ran it over a period of forty years. So talk about how your play revolves around this house in San Francisco. Does the house have a personality of its own? And how did you create this thread that linked your four stories together?

KIMBERLY: My dream has always been to own an old Victorian house. I want to live somewhere that has had a hundred Christmases. I love walking into an old house and feeling the vibe. Oh, it's a bad vibe. Oh, it's a good vibe. There are not nice people who have lived here. There ARE nice people who have lived here. I want to open up old doors and find the children's heights marked on the walls. I want to remove wallpaper and find what the original vintage wallpaper looked like. I'm that person. I'll never get that in California but I am that person. So just like the car movie that you were talking about and your record store, it's the same thing. It's the imprint that past occupants left behind. So the play starts with the owner who built the house. And then the San Francisco earthquake happened and it was not destroyed; it was one of the houses that survived, but it did have damage. So instead of knocking it over, they refurbished her and then three different women in three different decades who moved into that house all leave a secret message for each other and the house turns into being this place for them to feel and react, but they also feel very safe inside it. I want to live there myself. If I could move into that house, I would. Now there is narration before each play about how the house is feeling, how she feels on the outside, how she feels on the inside, all of which correlate to each story as it happens. The play is still in workshop so I'm still doing rewrites, but Jolyn Johnson, my director, has incorporated those monologs, those narrations, into a single human actor whose name is Paris, and invites her into the house more often than I had originally written. I love that. So the house itself is a full part of the story. The audiences love that. They love that and they get it.

VCOS: So what kind of an accent does a Victorian house have?

KIMBERLY: (laughs) She has so many! It's not a Victorian accent but there is an English accent at the end, there's a Southern accent in there, there's a French accent.

VCOS: Why does it change? What does that reflect in the story?

KIMBERLY: It's based on whoever happens to be there at the time. Mr. and Mrs. V were the original owners and then the next owner was Babette and her granddaughter Adora, but Babette's French. There was a big French population that was in San Francisco at one time. Nadine is another character and she came from one of the Southern states to follow her boyfriend out to San Francisco. And Victoria is from England but she's a completely different character. So they all migrated and found this house.

VCOS: Did you ever live in San Francisco?

KIMBERLY: No, but I love San Francisco. I live it for the houses. When I go, that's all I want to do, drive around and look at the houses. I'm obsessed, Cary, I'm obsessed.

VCOS: Have you seen the Painted Ladies on Steiner Street? I think they call that street Postcard Row.

KIMBERLY: Yes. That's actually who SHE is based on. Those are the houses that stand in that row and they're all painted pink and green and yellow and beautiful, but her exterior changes and becomes different throughout the play. I've had fun researching San Francisco and the history of it, incorporating the different eras an the struggles different people had during that time.

VCOS: How do you balance telling a story with making a statement about something? Is there some kind of underlying morality or attitude that you want to get across here?

KIMBERLY: Yes, there is definitely something that I am trying to convey here, especially with climate change and women's rights and the struggles that my friends and I have had as women. Cary, you know our Ventura County community is filled with amazing female actresses and I've wanted to write a play for them. I just wanted to highlight all the strong female talent that we have here. And yes, each story has a point, each story has a message. It's about their struggles, their personal demons, their relationships, love, loss, abuse, self discovery. It's about all of that. But the best part has been seeing the amazing talent in Ventura County playing these roles and being affected by them. I see them come off stage and have to decompress after a half hour or forty-five minutes. Two of the plays are monologs, two women standing up there all by themselves, carrying the show. And everything they go through, they go through on their own. I want to be up there and do it myself! That's how much I love watching them.

VCOS: Who are the actresses?

KIMBERLY: Paris de la Huerta plays She, who is the house and does the narration. Elizabeth Rose is Maddie, who is Mrs. V. Aubrey de la Huerta plays a character named Trish. Aubrey and Paris are sisters. Robert is the only male in the play, and he is played by Steven Silvers. In the second play, Babette is the French non-farting grandmother and she's played by Christine Adams. Her granddaughter, Adora, is played by the wonderful Hayley Silvers., who is Steven's sister so we have two sets of siblings in the play. Toni is played by Lauren Rachel. Then we go into the second act and we have Emily Redman Hall who plays Nadine, and in the very last play, Lea Roman who is playing Victoria.

SHE concludes its run Thursday through Sunday, June 13-16 at the Elite Theatre Company, 2731 S. Victoria Avenue in Oxnard. For ticket information, visit theelite.org.

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