LOW PROFILE Walk a Mile in Her Flip-Flops

THE RUMPLED DUMPLING IN CURLers, tent-tike Mexican muu-muu dress, and flip-flop sandals is hunkered over, consciously presenting a sizable derrière to the world, pulling laundry from the dryer. Though totally involved with the task at hand, her Mothers’ Sixth Sense tells her to turn around, and she does so in the nick of time.

“Tim my,” she snaps, “That’s nas-sty!”

Her tone of voice has left no doubt in our minds that whatever he was up to, it was something-well, nas-sty.

We can’t see Timmy, but he does exist. Out of thin air, Brendene Wade (nee Jill Peters) has created him for us, along with her daughter Su-Su, her husband Bo Clyde, and their double-wide trailer in Red Oak, Texas.

It’s 11:30 p.m. and where are we? An hour ago, the stage was full of those oh-so-flighty elfin people of the theater, cavorting about as they performed the Greenville Avenue Pocket Sandwich Theatre’s rendition of Fu Manchu- The Melodrama. Now they and even more of their breed are in the audience laughing their heads off. And stranger still, this perfect representative of the Fu Manchu audience, this child-swamped denizen of the coin-op laundromat who eschews the arty Dallas Theater Center productions but loves to escape for an evening to the Pocket Sandwich to eat potato chips, drink beer, and hiss at the villains-now she’s up there on the stage.

But amid her laundry, Brendene Wade doesn’t seem to understand that she’s the star of the show. She keeps dreaming aloud to herself about the future, about the time (that may never come) when she’ll be discovered. Then shell take her place in her pantheon of stars next to her heroes-ftitsy Cline, Liza Minnelli, Julie Andrews, and above all, Lena Home. For an hour or so, Brendene shows us the rich, internal world of musical romance she uses to block out the depressing reality of her life as the “bread and roll girl” on the serving line at Oak Grove’s Wyatt’s Cafeteria.

Brendene of Brendene: The Lady and her Laundry (and lately an updated Brendene II: Lena’s Revenge) is an underground hit, a one-woman cabaret phenomenon who is now being sought by several regional theaters and promoters for touring nationally and in Europe. The show’s Dallas revival is set for late October at the Landmark Center in the West End. And nobody could be happier than the woman underneath Brendene’s dime-store makeup, Jill Peters.

“I can’t say it’s all been fun getting here… but it sure has taken a long time,” she cracks, sitting in her East Dallas duplex, surrounded by her collection of toy flamingos and kitschy clocks.

Peters came to Dallas in 1970 as a freshman in SMU’s theater department. She had grown up in Bay Village, Ohio, a place she now describes as ’’Cleveland’s Highland Park-home of high fashion, high taxes, and Dr. Sam Sheppard’s murder case, the inspiration for ’The Fugitive’ series on television.

“You couldn’t go to high school there unless your outfit was coordinated. I fit in. I was the Sixties version of a bowhead. I got into theater because I didn’t make cheerleader. After I graduated in 1970, my mom didn’t want me to go to Kent State and get shot up. She wanted me to go someplace conservative. I knew I’d better study theater because I was lousy at math. SMU just seemed like the right place to go.”

But she couldn’t get acting roles. After several unsuccessful auditions, she switched from studying acting to directing. “I decided I’d be the person that picks the actors.”

Peters became friends with another misfit, a quirky blonde acting student from Jackson, Mississippi, named Beth Henley. She would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her play, Crimes of the Heart.

“I knew 1 liked her when 1 realized she was the only girl that auditioned worse than I did,” says Peters. “She’d get up on stage in bell-bottom jeans, terry-cloth houseshoes, and a red poodle pajama top and do Macbeth. Not Lady Macbeth, Macbeth.”

After reading some of Henley’s early attempts at play writing, Peters offered suggestions and eventually brought Henley’s work to the stage for the first time with student productions of Am I Blue? and Parade.

Another SMU friend, composing student Mark Hard wick, wrote Parade’s music and appeared in the show. He later took his songwriting skills and tap dance steps to the New York stage in The Pump Boys and Dinettes. And in the musical’s lead role, Jill cast Dallas native Stephen Tobolowsky, who has recently become a Hollywood character actor of choice, playing the head of the Klan in Mississippi Burning and the Sun Records business manager for Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire.

“Parade was a completely home-grown musical. We were doing Judy and Mickey in the barn, only it was the Student Center. It was a real lucky time to be around SMU. There were a lot of creative people around and the department hadn’t made a whole lot of rules yet, so we got to do what we wanted.”

But creativity and a degree from SMU do not guarantee employment for a young director. Opportunities were limited in the theater-poor Dallas of the mid-Seventies, so Peters made do with a job as a singing comic at a North Dallas medieval theme restaurant/dinner theater.

“It was all cockney accents, a lot of singing and slinging ribs, plopping down in a plethora of pastel leisure-suited laps. But working there, doing just about the same show for two years, made me fearless”

Despite her detour onto the meal-and-mutton circuit, Peters still considered herself a director. In time, she proved it on stages all over the Metroplex-from children’s shows at the shopping malls to a sketch about a troubled Vietnam vet on Channel 8’s “Que Pasa,” from Taming of the Shrew in Garland to Grease in Irving. However, these jobs didn’t pay much, and 1981 found Peters plunging into a belated business career. To help support her “theater habit,” she bought a Merry Maids franchise.

“The maid service was supposed to make it financially possible for me to go on hopping from theater to theater as a freelance director. It turned out to be incredibly time-consuming, much more than I bargained for. Selling it after four years was a great relief. But it gave me a real gift-my models for Brendene.”

Peters describes one particular maid who worked for her, a woman everyone referred to as Sweet Little Mary Ann: “SLMA was six foot one, weighed 280, and had a male pen pal in prison. She also had a jealous husband whose disposition had soured [breaking into SLMA’s slow drawl| ever since the motorcycle accident. Losing that arm makes pumping gas awful tiresome for him.“

After this dose of reality, Peters was anxious to scramble back to full-time work in the less palpable, more fanciful world of theater. She’s particularly proud of a production of Michatl Weller’s Moonchildren she directed at the Addison Centre Theatre in 1985, which was later extended and moved to the Pegasus Theatre in Deep Ellum.

With this success working for her, Peters thought she would be a shoo-in for the job of directing Uncommon Women and Others at ACT. Instead, she was amazed to find herself cast as a sixty-five-year-old woman in the show. Critic Dan Hulbert of the Dallas Times Herald praised her performance, and a talent agent asked to represent her for work in television commercials and industrial films. She immediately landed the first three jobs she was sent to audition for.

“I still saw myself as a director. I wasn’t ready for the big fuss being made about Jill The Actor all of a sudden. It was a rush and a huge ego blower-upper, but I was being pigeon-holed, always cast as a fat buffoon. I’d go to my agent and tell her, look, 1 can do white bread. I can read lines and talk about alcoholic treatment centers and cosmetics and all the other junk women sell. But all I got were the fat idiot jobs, playing the person who was stupid enough to buy the wrong product instead of the right product.

“I was becoming the Brand X actor and I didn’t like it. 1 wanted to do things that showed I had a heart, not just a so-called weight problem, the advertising world’s way of indicating stupidity and worthlessness.”

Enter Tim Hatcher.

“I saw Uncommon Women at ACT and was immediately struck by Jill,” Hatcher recalls. “She has a delightful, offbeat, innate sense of humor and a great sense of her physical self. She really uses it to her advantage. She just glows.”

In August of 1986, S.T.A.G.E. (The Society for Theatrical Artists’ Guidance and Enhancement) commissioned nine local writers to write seven-minute monologues on the subject of theater for a specific actor of their choosing. Hatcher wrote his for Jill, creating a woman named Brendene who’s never been to the theater until her husband wins two tickets to what she mistakenly calls Rocky and the Horror Show.

Peters thought Hatcher’s monologue “was amusing” and “might be fun to do,” but as the playwright’s forum approached, she began to get worried.

“All these other people were bringing in these deep, heartfelt speeches about what theater meant to them and here I come with this trailer-trash woman who can’t even get the names of the plays right. I was afraid the audience-all theater people, my peers- were going to think 1 was a real joke.”

But when the moment of truth arrived, they laughed “so loud, so hard, and so long” that it took her “forever” to get through the Brendene sketch.

“I had to stop after literally every sentence. They wouldn’t let me finish.”

In the meantime, Hatcher had been awarded the prestigious Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, a six-month writing residency in Austin, to complete his play The Death of Floyd Collins. He invited Peters to visit him there and discuss expanding the monologue into a full-length one-woman show. Peters had a head full of ideas.

“One thing that had always amazed me about Sweet Little Mary Ann and some of the other Merry Maids was how involved they were in the lives of characters on ’Dynasty.’ They’d have these knock-down, drag-out arguments while they got their mops and supplies together to go clean a house. [In SLMA voice] I just think that Blake ought to kick that Alexis in the butt. But, girl, you know he won’t do it ’cause Crystal won’t let him. She too nice.

“They were great mimics and they’d really invest themselves in acting out the characters as they argued. It got me thinking about my own addiction to late-night Channel 27 movies-especially the old musicals,” Peters says. “I suggested to Tim that we make Brendene an insomniac who does laundry all night, watching these old Lena Horne movies while singing and acting out the roles in her mind.”

They worked together “unrefining” Brendene for months, building up to the premiere in May of 1988 at the Pocket Sandwich Theatre. Somewhere along the way, the show picked up the heart that Jill Peters has wanted all along to give to an audience.

In his recent rave review in the Dallas Observer, Brad Bailey called the show “a bittersweet comedy that, rather than making you alternately laugh and cry, makes you laugh and think and keep on laughing… After a dose of Brendene, it’s very likely you’ll think twice before mentally pigeonholing someone into the class of ’just a waitress’ or ’fat, dumb housewife’ again.” Bailey praised Brendene for its special gift: “a slow-building awareness of just how much our culture as a whole is missing because of such blanket write-offs and presumptions about ’class’ and all attendant equations about beauty and talent and worth.”

Precisely the insights Peters had hoped to communicate.

“Theater is best when it gives people healing and hope. Brendene puts it all on the line, says what’s true for her, and hangs on to her dream. Maybe she gives people hope. I hope so. At any rate, I’m glad 1 got a chance to walk a mile in her flip-flops.”