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A Different Woman

nytheatre.com review by Kimberly Wadsworth
August 15, 2005

In 1925, Texas-born schoolteacher Gertrude Beasley published her autobiography, My First Thirty Years, with a Paris publisher. Her book was banned in three countries, and most copies of the first and only printing were destroyed by U.S. customs. Beasley herself disappeared two years later when she was returning home from a failed attempt to republish the book in England. So it’s something of a miracle that Veronica Russell, creator of A Different Woman, even found the book in the first place, and together with director Perry Martin she is bringing Beasley’s story to an audience at last.Gertrude’s story was banned for “reasons of obscenity.” While the events of her life—including child abuse, incest and bestiality, and an absent parent—aren’t as shocking today, they were still unquestionably brutal. Her very first memory was of one of her older brothers trying to rape her when she was only four. She was the ninth child out of thirteen, and her early childhood was spent in absolute straw poverty with an inexperienced farmer for a father and a mother who resented having so many children—and always made sure the children knew it. By the time Gertrude was in her teens, her mother had taken the children and left her father. Gertrude later won a scholarship to an exclusive girl’s school in Abilene; she threw herself into her studies to escape the chaos at home, and put herself through college in Texas and graduate work in Chicago.Russell has adapted Gertrude’s story as a one-woman show, and at its outset plays her as a deeply bitter, cynical woman who is telling her story to exorcise some old ghosts. She retells some of the crueler parts of her story with an almost matter-of-fact casualness, or a “can you believe how dumb my family is” eye roll. But at times Russell lets the facade crack, and we see just how much pain Gertrude is still in; talking about her brother trying to beat her just gets a shrug, but talking about a letter from her father begging the family to come home makes her turn away from the audience to compose herself. In Russell’s adaptation, Gertrude returns again and again to the subject of her parents—even when she tries to completely change the subject, talking about how she discovered socialism, before long she is again talking about her mother’s reaction to her ideas. It’s soon clear that Gertrude’s story is really about her parents, and about her longing for what could have been instead of what was.“It is perfectly clear to me that life is not worth living,” Gertrude wrote, “but it is also equally clear that life is worth talking about.” It is just as clear that her story deserves the audience it never got, and one hopes that through Russell’s work it will finally be heard.