Beginnings

Yes, I really did play Juliet in The Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company. And Electra and Ophelia. But the game changing moment of my twenties was discovering the power of theatre to disrupt. I was living in the landlocked country of Lesotho, which in 1979 was surrounded by apartheid South Africa. My partner and I became friends with Dukuza- Ka-Macu, a Soweto-based writer living in Lesotho with other ante-apartheid activists. Together we adapted Amiri Baraka’s two-person play, “Dutchman,” and performed it in a local dinner theatre. The white South African audience were looking for lighter fare. They had crossed the border into Lesotho for the casinos not the arts.

When they saw a white woman and a black man engaging with one another on the same stage, they could not finish their meals. They walked out of the theatre. It is the power of live theatre to move people-- in this case  literally --that hooked me, whether it’s reprising this same theme in Athol Fugard’s “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act,” or performing with DC legend Rebecca Rice in a theatre piece about and for battered women living in shelters, or living through a story drama with young children in a church basement. 

I have been a member of many ensembles in the DC theatre scene from Helen Hayes nominated “Top Girls” to “The Three penny Opera” at Columbia Station.

Solo Work

When my children were teenagers and I could no longer justify frittering my evenings away in rehearsal halls, I discovered monologue. I premiered the US production of Franca Rame’s “The Mother” about a middle class Italian woman whose son is accused of terrorism for murdering a policeman and must ask herself  if she should have given birth to him? “The Body,” written by my wonderful friend Washington Post critic and author, Sibbie O Sullivan, is an up close and personal celebration of birth, death and everything in between that played to overflow audience at the Clarice Smith Center.

Cynthia Word of Word Dance Theatre invited me to explore the liminal space between  language and gesture. Collaborating with Cynthia and her company,  I wrote and  performed the role of Isadora Duncan in “Revolutionary.” “Revolutionary” was a critics pick of the Washington Fringe Festival  when it played at the  Shakespeare Theatre, and was a hit again  at the Clarice Smith Center, Dance Place and at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC.

In Spring 2019 an excerpt from my novel, La Puente, was adapted to a multi media performance by The CarPort Theatre in Tucson, AZ and was a Tucson City Paper pick of the week. You can watch the performance here.

In the Fall 2021 “The Gift,” a play for young audiences, will be produced and developed at the College for the Arts at UNC in Greensboro. “The Gift” engages the early life of Isadora Duncan to explore the concept of giftedness, which, in theory,  we admire,  but in practice we often fear and resist. We want to believe that every child has a unique gift to share with the world, but what if the relationship  between the gift and the gifted is uneasy or worse still hostile? What does it mean to embrace your gift?

Tiny House Plays

Get tickets to see “The Power Behind the Comb” at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in DC.

“The Power Behind the Comb” is a monologue that I devised to honor my mother-in-law, Etta Lynch, who died in November after spending her last nine months isolated in a Texas nursing home. Etta swore that she would haunt anyone who gave her a  church funeral, so together with Dorothy Neumann, a three time Helen Hayes nominee for Outstanding Direction, I created my own secular memorial.

I donned a red bouffon wig of  ‘helmet hair’ and piled on the lipstick, to look at the world through the eyes of a woman who lived large in a harsh one, a woman whose vitality was fueled by self-reliance, vanity, caustic humor and a bottomless flask of vodka.

 Zoom wasn’t the right medium for Etta. She had been holed up on her own for too long, so Dot and I ventured out into the homes of  the newly-vaccinated, and invited them into Etta’s locked down life.

“This is an intimate, vivid performance that's part confab, part confession. Its rightful setting is a living room in which the character is just as present and alive as her audience of confidantes. By the end you've so completely forgotten there's an actor involved you have to remind yourself to clap,” one audience member said.

In my forty year career in the theatre, I have performed in mainstages, auditoriums, black boxes, cabaret settings, and multi-media spaces. I have performed in community centers and shelters. This is the first time that I have ever done live theatre in someone else’s living room with my audience an arms length away. I have spoken the words of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Jean Genet, Caryl Churchill and Isadora Duncan. Now I am channeling my mother-in-law and together we are writing a script for and about the two of us. Every performance, I learn to judge less and to love more.  

There have already been twelve performances in the DMV area, with a maximum audience of eighteen and some as small as four. This face-to-face contact --the very intimacy that Etta was deprived of-- generates the connection that we have all been missing. The show goes on long after the actor has taken her bow.    

We invite you to invite Etta into your home to meet and entertain your friends, to share her secrets and to reassure us that none of us truly dies alone.

This play works for small audiences but would play equally well in a larger setting and for a bigger audience.

For more information on booking this performance, please email spleydell@gmail.com.

Watch Etta and Jimmy dancing the West Texas night away.

Praise for “the power behind the comb”

“The privilege of attending all of our first post-Covid in-person, live theatrical event, The Power Behind the Comb, by Sarah Pleydell.  Sarah is an accomplished actor and adapter/writer and the piece had precision and specificity of character, region, and a sense of unfolding age and sensibility that I really appreciated.” — Ari Roth, theatre director

“Sarah Pleydell commands the stage In a performance that feels intimate yet spontaneous, about a  woman who turns her back on the conventional, to willing to suffer the consequences and in the end is vindicated.  It left me breathless.” — Rhoda Bauer, glass artist

“Exquisite and still with me. Sarah your spirits ‘charmed’ me with a magical yet real presence. Find myself thinking how the term “steel magnolias” evokes these startling women. Tender and Tough." — Heidi Lippman, sculptor

“Thank you for the amazing performance last week. As a teacher, mid-week events aren't my favorite - I'm always thinking about when I can get to bed.  But your performance transformed me in such a way that I forgot all about what I had to do the next day and when I needed to be in bed to be functional the next day.  I was so moved by your transformation.  It's encouraged me to try writing my feelings for my own mother-in-law, but I hope I can recreate the feeling you created for yours.” — Audience member

“Sarah brought to life a poignant character that we all can connect with, the dreamer burdened by the demands of a family, yearning for more, shackled by medieval demands of wives and mothers, where they are never fully able to pursue their dreams and aspirations. At times, light and comical, but mostly serious —-her inspiring performance left me riveted and grappling with our shared human trauma. The profound grief of the past year, isolation and loss from the pandemic consumed us in this performance.” — Andrew Lee, musician