Two theater patrons upstage Zelda

The Theater of the American South's Friday night opening was a one-woman show, but two women were in the spotlight before the curtain rose. Before Betsy Henderson portrayed neurotic, aging Zelda Fitzgerald on stage, Edna Earle Boykin and Carol Blake Baldwin accepted the ovations of the crowd who gathered for a reception celebrating the reopening of the Edna Boykin Cultural Center, formerly known as the Wilson Theatre.

Arts Council director Barry Page, in a voice that required no amplification, reviewed for the crowd the history of the place where they had gathered and the contributions of the two women in turning the Boykin Center into the showplace it has become. The city-owned theater had recently undergone nearly $100,000 in structural repairs. Page also cited the contributions of local attorney Woody Harrison, who led a small group that kept the theater's dream alive at a time when few people thought its transformation was possible. Donors provided food and drinks for the reception for everyone attending the Friday night production.

Boykin, a retired school principal (and once Page's boss), spearheaded city efforts to preserve and renovate the theater. She recalled the public opposition to the project as a costly boondoggle that would never succeed. As a member of City Council, Boykin got out in front of public opinion and pushed the vision for renovation of the theater, which had recently been an X-rated movie house. Boykin also made the largest private donation to the theater renovation, earning her name a place on the marquee.

Carol Blake, who has since left Wilson, kept the theater project alive in those early years as a part-time director and preservationist. She finagled volunteers and community service workers to stabilize the theater and begin its renovation, even when it had no effective heating or air conditioning, its seats were a wreck and its ornate plaster was falling. Blake and Harrison fought off the naysayers who wanted the 1919 theater sold or bulldozed.

After the recognitions and Boykin's witty comments, it was time for "The Last Flapper." Henderson faced the unenviable task of spending two hours alone on stage, reciting nonstop dialogue as Zelda's schizophrenic mind relives various key events in her life. Henderson made William Luce's script, confined to a psychiatrist's  office at Highland Hospital in Asheville, plausible. The play moves slowly at first as Henderson's extended soliloquy is interjected by announcements over the hospital's public address system. The pace picks up halfway through the first act when Zelda begins recalling and reliving her sometimes-rocky relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henderson carries Zelda's perspective through the volatile second act.

Watching Henderson's monumental challenge of recreating the nonstop thoughts of a deranged woman for two hours, I began to wonder why playwrights have so taken to one-person shows. We've gone from a minute or two of Shakespearean soliloquy (Hamlet's "To be or not to be ..." or Lady MacBeth's "Out, out, damned spot ...") to two full hours of monologue, which has to challenge even the most skilled actors and the most effective and efficient memories. Last year at Theater of the American South, Quinn Hawkesworth did an amazing job in spending two hours on stage in Lee Smith's "Fair and Tender Ladies" (she had been Allan Gurganus' "Oldest Living Confederate Widow" the year before). The only thing that makes Hawkesworth's achievement overshadow Henderson's this year is that Hawkesworth also had a major role in the theater festival's other production last year, "Steel Magnolias," which ran in repertory. That anyone can remember that many lines and deliver them flawlessly,  as both Hawkesworth and Henderson did, absolutely amazes me.

The one-person show trend seems to have started, at least in my memory, 30 or so years ago with Hal Holbrooke's highly successful "Mark Twain Tonight." Other historical figures, including Harry Truman, have been portrayed in one-person shows, and playwrights seem to like the genre. But these scripts have to be a challenge for actors, and the audience is subjected to a performance that is, in essence, a two-hour lecture, no matter how well performed. I'll confess to having to fight to keep from nodding off deep into these one-person shows, and I've noted many others making the same struggle.

Shakespeare knew that good theater was about action, and that requires more than one character on the stage, so he kept his soliloquies mercifully brief. And that was long before our attention spans were decimated by news briefs, texting, Twitter and sound bites.