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Vanities
2007

Director's Notes

I have a special place in my heart for Vanities.  It was the first college play I ever worked on, at Ole Miss in 1978.  The director (saint that she was), appreciating my enthusiasm despite recognizing my lack of experience, training, and ability, installed me in the position of assistant to the assistant director.  I held the script when needed, helped lift the boxes, encouraged the actors, and, in my first big break, got to run the lights one night after the light operator fell on his sword and broke three fingers while acting in a production of Helena’s Husband.  (I was nowhere near the theatre that night, by the way, and I have witnesses.) 

At the time, Vanities was at the crest of its popularity, in the middle of a long and successful off-Broadway run and being performed in college theatres across the land.  This bittersweet comedy had been a hit from the moment it burst onto the American theatre scene in late 1975, a unique theatrical experience in which the actresses put on their make up in front of the audience to the beat of songs of the changing times.  Starring Kathy Bates as Joanne, Vanities moved to New York in March 1976 and ran for five years and 1,785 performances before closing in 1981 as one of the longest-running off-Broadway shows ever.  That same year HBO made a film version featuring three of the most popular television actresses of the day:  Meredith Baxter-Birney as Joanne, Annette O’Toole as Kathy, and Shelley Hack as Mary.  Recent years have seen a mini-revival of the play, and last year a musical version premiered in California, with plans to move to Broadway in late 2007.

Like the three cheerleaders in Vanities, playwright Jack Heifner was a Texan born in 1946 (the first year of the baby boomers) who graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas (even though neither Texas nor SMU is specifically mentioned in the script).  Along with two of Heifner’s shorter plays, Patio and Porch, Vanities was part of a brief 1970s craze for plays set in Texas.  These included Preston Jones’s Texas Trilogy and the popular musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Vanities is a coming-of-age story that chronicles the lives of three best friends during the turbulent 60s and 70s, when seismic social changes, like the girls at their vanities, transformed the face of America.  For me, however, the play’s charm stems not as much from its theatricality or social backdrop as from the fact that we all knew girls like Joanne and Kathy and Mary in high school.  We wrote in their yearbooks and promised we would never forget them - even if after a few years our words seemed so silly. Perhaps, if we live long enough, we might pick up those yearbooks again and think something quite different indeed.

I’ve forgotten a lot of the people I’ve worked with in theatre over the years, but I haven’t forgotten anyone from that 1978 production.  My happiest memory of that play was the closeness within the company - and especially the intense bond that the three actresses formed for each other.  It has been the same this time around at Calhoun.  Striving together toward a difficult, common goal is one of the joys theatre, and of life, and I have appreciated how much this play has meant to those involved.  

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