Solo actor Woodard brings children's lives out of the shadows in Playhouse's 'Night Watcher' workshop

By ANNE MARIE WELSH - For the North County Times | Wednesday, June 25, 2008 8:27 AM PDT ∞

"No play is complete until you have that audience," says Charlayne Woodard, the charismatic actor whose new play "The Night Watcher" is the next Page to Stage workshop presentation of La Jolla Playhouse. "I can't tell you how great it is, this process. This is a gift to any writer. The rehearsal period for plays is too abbreviated. To be able to come in with no critics, but to have an audience and a space, a dramaturge and (the ability) to change things daily, that is a gift."

Woodard's monthlong, work-in-progress performances at the Mandell Weiss Forum (beginning Tuesday) are the latest entry in a varied, much-lauded play development program. Since its inception in 2001, the Playhouse's Page to Stage has generated Broadway hits (Doug Wright's "I Am My Own Wife" and Billy Crystal's "700 Sundays"), the musical "Zhivago," and edgier pieces such as "Paris Commune" by New York's iconoclastic young troupe, The Civilians.

"The Night Watcher" is Woodard's fourth one-woman play and also her fourth appearance at the Playhouse which, over the course of two decades, has showcased many facets of this gifted writer-performer who balances theater work with a film and television career.

In the Des McAnuff-directed 1986 "Shout Up a Morning!" (with music by Nate and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley), she showed the same knockout voice and musical theater charisma that lit up the original Broadway cast of "Ain't Misbehavin'." In 1994, she triumphed as the compassionate Shen Te and the cigar-chomping capitalist Shui Ta, the challenging double leading role of Brecht's "The Good Person of Setzuan" at the Playhouse.

In 1999, she earned raves there for her potent breakthrough solo "Pretty Fire," about her own coming-of-age and her story-telling grandmother.

And on Tuesday, just months after a widely praised debut as Kate in director Rebecca Bayla Taichman's "The Taming of the Shrew" at the Shakespeare Theatre in D.C., Woodard unveils her still-developing "The Night Watcher." Robert Egan directs; he heads the Ojai Playwrights Conference, where Woodard completed a first draft of the script and "its basic shape" last summer.

"I call my works 'plays with one actor,' Basically I'm a storyteller," Woodard says. "When I first wrote 'Pretty Fire,' I did it for 400 African-American women at a church retreat. I had to write about my grandmother, who had just died. Those women (in the audience) finished my sentences."

Calling her writing career "this amazing thing," she says it never occurred to her even as a drama student at Chicago's Goodman School of Drama that she could be a writer.

"I knew I couldn't be a ballerina. I’d never fit into the corps â€- But I always read. I loved great fiction ---- Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, people who wrote from the heart. Eventually they made me realize you can write from your own voice, from your heart."

The wife of her bishop at the West Angeles church of God in Christ had asked her to sing at the spiritual retreat attended by those 400 women. But she also wanted to tell them about her grandmother, an anecdote that became the last segment of "Pretty Fire." It was about "the events that led up to me saying that I was an artist, because it was my grandmother who helped me see that's who I was."

And though the artist and her lawyer husband Alan Harris (they first dated when she was 17) have no children of their own, Woodard says she is now surrounded by children and young people whom she serves, as her grandmother did her, by listening.

"I'm surrounded by kids ---- nieces and nephews and godchildren and friend's children. It is so gratifying to have kids in your life. They call me and they can really get to me, since I've known some since they were babies. They attach to you, and now, 16 years later, I might take my three godchildren with me on a hike and listen to their stories."

What has been "bothering me to the depths of my soul," she says, and what inspired "The Night Watcher," was the "condition of so many kids in this school system, in this society. We all have to get more involved because it really does take a village. Where is the village? When I grew up, my mother and father were 30 years old and had five kids and they certainly didn't do it alone. They had the village."

The kids whose stories she tells are "black, white, rich, poor, middle class. All I wanted to do was pay just a little bit of attention because they need us as mentors, as friends. I get all these 'Dear Auntie'’ e-mails asking me what they should do about this or that."

In the piece, Woodard adopts "all the different voices: Mommy, Daddy, sisters, girlfriends, the whole kit and caboodle. It's a wild ride, that's for sure."

Woodard also, she says, uses all the tools of the African storyteller, "the griot, the music and the movement and the words themselves, everything that the story needs."

In her off-stage life, Woodard has been happily involved with an organization called The Fulfillment Fund. For that not-for-profit organization, she made a five-year commitment to be a mentor to an underserved teenage girl. Woodard serves as a trusted guide, providing tutoring, college prep help, expanded horizons and a sustaining friendship.

"It's so wonderful," she says, "to hear my mentee Alicia introduce me to people as 'my friend Charlayne.' Kids need us like that."

Woodard's radiant enthusiasm for her life and work is palpable during what she's calling "this theater year."

"I love being onstage. I write my own plays because I need a play to act in. But you can't do it part-time."

So she put the film roles ("The Crucible," "Unbreakable") and television work (recurring roles on "Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles" and "Law and Order, Special Victims Unit") on hold to develop "The Night Watcher." The new piece is scheduled for its first full production next year at Seattle Repertory, directed by Dan Sullivan.

Woodard's time in La Jolla will offer her another bonus. Difficult as it is to imagine another actor with enough poise and power onstage to perform the solo plays she's written, Woodard says they get done all the time, though she rarely sees them.

In a welcome bit of synchronicity, two nights before she closes "The Night Watcher" at the Playhouse, Lamb's Players in Coronado will open its own production of "Pretty Fire" featuring frequent Lamb's associate, Tracy Hughes.

"Finally," Woodard says, "I’ll get to see it."

"The Night Watcher"

When: Opens July 1 and runs through July 27; showtimes, 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays

Where: La Jolla Playhouse at the Mandell Weiss Forum Studio, UC San Diego, La Jolla

Tickets: $25

Phone: (858) 550-1010

Web: www.lajollaplayhouse.org

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