How a Suburban Mom Transformed Boredom and Dread
Written by Allison Engel and Margaret Engel, featuring Sarah Fleming Walker, the Austin Playhouse Associate Artistic Director, and central character who performed in the one-woman show Erma Bombeck: at wit’s end. Directed by Austin Playhouse Producing Artistic Director Lara Toner Haddock, she was also responsible for the costume and production design. David Esbjornson originally developed this project for the stage.
Walker embodied the character almost too realistically. Her performance brought out the best and worst in the character she portrayed. A frustrated journalist who gave up her career for suburbia and motherhood for a good fifteen years to raise her family, finds her way back to writing in 1964.
She wrote a column called At Wit’s End about the everyday life she felt trapped in. The humorous and realistic quips transformed her sad reality of a dreary life so that millions of American women reading her column could find some relief.
“If you want to get rid of stinking odors, just stop cooking.”
In those days, many mothers admonished their children with stark imagery and Bombeck mimicried it in her column, “If that lawnmower cuts off your toes, don’t come to me”, which sounds hilarious. If one made a statement today like that it probably wouldn’t resonate with a younger audience and a sticker “trigger warning” would most likely be attached. Since the theatregoers to this show were mostly over forty, there was no need for apologies.
Yet the nagging issue of her discontent pervaded her entire life, even well into the dawning of the women’s lib years in the 1960s. “Why is motherhood the most important job if no one wants to know how it’s done?” That question and many others related to the unequal and disproportionate work a mother, wife, and homemaker was expected to perform gracefully unnerved some of her readers, who wrote her nasty letters. That is not dissimilar to today’s ranting on social media when one poses an opinion or dares to question social norms.
Yet Erma persisted. She read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and the audience got to hear a snippet of a live broadcast from her during the performance. It brought me back to my childhood, when as a teenager who identified strongly as a burgeoning feminist, I devoured all the literature, including Friedan, Steinem, Abzug, and the like, including Ms. Magazine. I too took umbrage with Bombeck’s column finding it disingenuous, and cowardly. If she hated her life so much why didn’t she do anything about it? Because turning resentment into humor alleviates only a small part of the suffering but doesn’t cure it. I wanted to find a cure and it wasn’t reading Bombeck’s books or weekly columns. Why would a teenager want to anyway? At least one who was adamant about not getting married or becoming a secretary upon graduation from high school!
Her career at its apex included a syndicated column in nine hundred newspapers nationwide to an audience of thirty million readers. When asked at school what his mother did, her son replied, “She’s a syndicated communist.”
The costume Walker wore of a pistachio short sleeved dress below the knee with buttons to the waist, her curled inverted pageboy do and black shoes were appropriate and fitting. The set was simply designed by Mike Toner with realistic touches like a rotary black phone and portable typewriter. Credits go to the production stage manager, Keiny Cantu and to the sound designer Gray G. Haddock. Technical support was provided by Robert S. Fisher and Mark Novick.
The show runs until June 14 at Austin Playhouse. boxoffice@austinplayhouse.com for tickets or visit the website www.austinplayhouse.com Phone 512-476-0084.
Austin Playhouse is a professional theatre in its 25th season. Currently under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director Lara Toner Haddock, and Associate Artistic Directors Ben Wolfe and Sarah Fleming Walker, Austin Playhouse has grown from a three-play season on the campus of Concordia University, to a year-round operation producing a subscription season, theatre for youth productions, and a new play festival. Austin Playhouse plans to build a permanent home for the veteran theatre troupe and all of Austin’s artistic community.