One-woman Show
June 2004
Litigation, to diaper bags, Former Washingtonian brings fictionalized work of life to one-woman show
By Lisa Traiger
There aren’t too many works of dramatic – or even comic- theater that feature a suburban wife and mother whose days are filled idling in the carpool lane, sitting on the soccer sidelines and lugging baby carriers and diaper bags to the grocery store.
Pamela Sherman, a self-described recovering lawyer who tossed away a corporate litigation career to pursue her dream of acting realized that women like her were missing from the stage. Then she decided to do something about it.
The results: “Pumping Josey: Life and Death in Suburbia,” Sherman’s one-woman love-song to middle class Jewish suburban motherhood, with its ups and downs, its trials and tribulations and its moments of sheer hilarity and unrelenting angst.
It’s a 70 minute send-up with a sobering message at heart. Pumping Josey the centerpiece of Horizons Theatre’s “Going Solo” showcase of female performers opens tonight in Arlington’s Theatre on the Run, where it splits the bill with a trio of rotating productions through June 27.
While Sherman, a former Washingtonian, who now makes her home in Pittsford, N.Y. lives in spitting distance from Rochester she insists that Pumping Josey is a highly-fictionalized account of her life.
A New York City native Sherman worked as a successful attorney for six years following her graduation from Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. It was a life in the fast-lane: business suits, briefcases, meetings and hearings.
Then her firm, a prominent downtown one, went under. “I quit to become a full-time actor. It seemed like a more secure profession at the time,” she quips.
At 30 Sherman resuscitated her childhood ambition and immersed herself in acting workshops at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and Oxford in London where she studied Shakespeare.
Back in Washington Sherman built a steady career performing in commercials, industrials, and local nonprofit theaters, including Theater J, Arena Stage, the Kennedy Center’s Lab Theater (as one of the cuckoo “Shear Madness” bunch) and Horizons Theater.
“I was outed,” she claims “when one of my law partners recognized me form a Murray’s Steak commercial.”
When husband, Neal a marketing consultant and owner of an equipment firm, wanted to relocate his business to his hometown in upstate New York, and bring jobs to the depressed area Sherman caved.
But not without trepidation. Washington after all, supports one of the most vibrant and creative nonprofit theater communities in the country. It remains her artistic home. “I think my fingernail marks are still on the banister of my house in Bethesda,” she quips. “They had to take me out feet first.”
Living in a small town, though, has allowed Sherman to take risks she previously wouldn’t have considered, like spending a week in Los Angeles meeting with agents and auditioning for sitcoms. Or collaborating on the original script for Pumping Josey with Caleen Sinnette Jennings.
Sherman and Jennings, an award-winning playwright and theater professor at American University, met periodically over the course of more than a year to develop Sherman’s story into a dramatic piece.
“I had this seminal, highly dramatic event occur that puts life in perspective in a way you don’t expect.” Sherman explained. A few short weeks after delivering her second child, she received a dreaded phone call.
“Are you sitting down?” Sherman recalls the friend on the line asking, “Randi Waxman dropped dead.”
Waxman a fellow lawyer who also left the field to pursue her dream of becoming a college professor, was Sherman’s best friend. Waxman left a husband and two young daughters, and to this day the cause of her death remains a mystery. Sherman was shaken to her core.
“Phone calls like that you get about old men, your grandparents’ and parents’ friends. But not about your contemporary, a young wife and mother…” she trails off, momentarily speechless still pained by the loss of her friend.
That’s Sherman’s story and Josey’s. Reflecting, she realized that she had something to say about motherhood and life that she learned through experiencing the death of her best friend.
“We women have stories to tell about our everyday lives that can be theatrical in a big way.” Sherman says.
In Pumping Josey Sherman plays 10 characters, including her balabuste mother, who will make a brisket but won’t change a diaper, and a trio of childhood heroines: Anna Freud, Hannah Senesh, and Mary Todd Lincoln.
Sherman chose Freud in an amusing homage to her upbringing - her father was a gynecologist and her mother, a psychoanalyst. Their daughter quips: “When I was growing up and I said I had a headache, my dad would say ‘take two aspirin’; my mom would ask ‘who are you mad at?’”
Josey though, isn’t Sherman, and the actress insists that her character is more vulnerable. But both women in fiction and in life, learn lessons.
“Josey realizes,” Sherman says, “that just because your life is finite and just because you’re also busy with mundane things doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue your dreams. Your vision doesn’t have to die when the people around you die.”