Whittier Inspires a Play About Heritage Stripped by Man and Nature

The United States may be the only country that doesn’t have much interest in preserving its heritage. If a buck is to be made, landmarks must go, along with memories and, according to playwright-actress Robin Sherwood, the poetry of the past.

That’s only part of the subject of her first play, “Clare’s Dream,” opening tonight at Hollywood’s Coast Playhouse. The production, directed by Deborah LaVine, explores the loss of that past in the mind of a writer who is about to rediscover herself along with all-but-forgotten memories of what it used to be like in Whittier, Calif.

“This is a little town,” the playwright says, “like any other little town, but most of their heritage has been destroyed, either by earthquakes or real estate development. They have little teeny sections left of those old little towns with the little town squares, but most of it’s gone. I feel very sad about that, as to how it relates to the American mind. What’s more important here? Malls? These hideous buildings that are going to be knocked down in 10 years, and other ones that are going to be built?” That’s what attracted Sherwood, 31, to Whittier and to the theme of her play.

She has loved theater since her first appearance in Florida at the age of 10. At 16, she entered Sarah Lawrence College in London under a Students Abroad program and studied with teachers from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was already a member of Screen Actors Guild by the time she went to London.

Returning to New York, Sherwood found herself cowed by Broadway auditions--”I couldn’t take that, I was scared to death!”--so she turned to films, including Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” and “Death Wish II” with Charles Bronson.

Los Angeles theatergoers may remember her in 1977’s “Voice of the Turtle” at the Zephyr Theatre.

“Then my father died,” she said, “and I wanted, in some way, to eulogize him.” Her father was a well-known restaurateur in Florida, and putting on her writer’s cap, Sherwood wrote a series of articles about him, which led to further articles on food and restaurants, and appearances on TV cooking shows around the country. Her search for material led her to Whittier and a startling discovery.

“I walked into the town square,” she remembers, “and I said to myself, ‘I have been here. I have lived here before.’ I could actually smell the orange groves. Yes, I heard it in the wind: ‘This is you. This is where you belong. There’s a story to be told here.’ And I knew I was the one to tell it.”

Gradually, the character of Clare began to materialize in Sherwood’s mind, at first, in a monologue.

Then Sherwood saw the film “Field of Dreams” and was overwhelmed, she said. “That gave me the impetus. ‘God help me,’ I thought, ‘if I could only be a writer like that.’ ” She wrote a fan letter to the author-director, Phil Alden Robinson, and they became friends. He encouraged her to put Clare into a full-length play and even helped her set up a word processor to work on.

“I came to a point four years ago where I said, ‘OK, all right, I’ve now done everybody else’s stuff. What, Robin, do you want to do? I want to do theater.’ ”

Sherwood’s dream is theater. Clare’s dream in the play is to be a poet. There is a hint that there are parallels between the author and her character. Sherwood was raised in a well-to-do conservative neighborhood in Miami Beach, so she’s familiar with the world in the time frame of the play, 1938, when Clare “was a little girl who dreamed of being a poet, but she lived in very conservative Whittier and had very conservative parents. Her lot in life, as far as her parents’ expectations, and those of the time and her class, were marriage to a wealthy man and to continue the line. She never fit in, from day one.”

Clare escaped to Paris, where she wrote serials. “She was a penny-a-liner. She filled space,” the author said. Clare also watched Jewish friends being taken away by the Germans. “I’m going through that,” Sherwood states. “I have friends who have died from AIDS, and it’s very overwhelming.

“Then, when Clare comes home, she has her widowed dad to deal with, and she realizes that, though she’d gone through these real big things in her life, the real battle had just begun, and that’s to find out who she really is.”

LaVine was attracted to the play for the same reasons. The director, in her late 30s, is a veteran of more than 90 productions, including the recent hit “A Shayna Maidel” at the Tiffany Theatre. LaVine says “Clare’s Dream” “covers some issues that are not superficial and not easy candy. It’s not easy to eat. One is a father-daughter relationship, which is very complicated and difficult. Then there’s a young woman in a period when women were supposed to be very specific in their roles: married, being a social maven. . . . It still exists today, but it’s not as difficult.” In the play’s period and locale, LaVine said, a woman who didn’t fulfill a traditional woman’s role was an outcast.

“Another dilemma that interests me is, how do you marry the past and the future? And that applies to the locale, the rural part of California being transformed for new profit, with the oil wealth coming in and ripping down the orange groves. How do you go forward? How do you bring progress and industry in, and do you lose and savage the land, and the poetry in the land?”

This is the first time LaVine has worked with a playwright who is also acting in the production, but she said this has not caused any problems except at rehearsals, when she would have loved to have had the playwright beside her instead of in front of her. The special qualities of the play, she said, make it “a tough one. It’s really fragile and delicate. That’s why I like working on it. There’s a difference between just working with craft, and working with things that inspire you.”

Commenting on her own inspiration and any similarities between her and Clare’s dreams, Sherwood admits, “I think it would be impossible to write or do any art that would not have a lot of me. Yeah. I’m absolutely every one of those people in the play. They are parts of me. I learned a lot about myself from writing it. Doing this play has given me a lot of courage to stand up for my principles. That was a hard thing to do.”