One woman, thirty characters, one night

The Warehouse Theatre is presenting a special performance of the award winning one woman show Freedom of Speech by Eliza Jane Schneider. The actress, songstress, oral historian, and playwright is a woman of many voices. Currently, she can be heard worldwide on Comedy Central’s hit animated series South Park as Wendy Testaberger, Shelly Marsh, Principal Victoria, The Mayor, Mrs. Cartman, Mrs. Crabtree, Stan’s Mom, and Kenny’s Mom, among others. She also voices most of the female characters on MTV’s animated show, 3-South .

A true story, Eliza Jane Schneider’s 30+ character solo play, Freedom of Speech , will take the audience on her journey through the kitchenettes and hearts of Arizona polygamists, Los Angeles dominatrixes and Montana Huterites, and into the real social emergencies facing America as a nation. Arkansas fiddles, Pittsburgh street rap and New Orleans midnight arias provide the soundtrack to Schneider’s 317,000-mile spiritual quest, born of her hypothesis that dialects - residual phonemes - are the only archeological dig the kids of America have. What began as a World Arts and Cultures thesis project at UCLA and evolved through various cocoons as Road Trip and USA 911 , emerges as a jarring sociopolitical manifesto, Freedom of Speech .

After having her wrist broken by a cop while protesting the first Gulf war, Schneider’s fear of being permanently jettisoned into the numbing barrage of media hype on which her generation was weaned, incites her to cash in her assets, quit her “dream” job on television, shave her head, buy an ambulance, and set off across the country in search of - something she could not define. Esoteric voices? Or truth? Almost 10 years and over a thousand interviews later, she invites us on her journey. She revisits a collage of disenfranchised American voices from the streets. She sets up a dialectic between the disconnected: urban and rural; rich and poor; New York and the South, all while taking the audience on her own wild ride from Arizona to Alabama to Alaska, stopping off in beauty parlors, swimming holes, bars, street corners, and churches, asking everyone she met, simply, “What’s going on?” The answers challenge us to question the precarious premises upon which we rest our worldviews.

We are feminists seduced by hypnotic Utopia-hawking polygamists; vegetarians donning a camouflage cap at deer camp in West Virginia; Jews driving to see the Blessed Virgin Mary appear on the side of a barn. We accompany a junkie to cop a fix. A Mexican-American marine tells about covert missions he fought in Beirut and Grenada. A nursing mother, in the process of rewriting the Declaration of Independence, contends “Tom Jefferson said, you must have a revolution every twenty years to keep the government straight, well, we haven’t had a revolution in so long, it’s ridiculous.”

Still seeking a Universal Truth, we return with Schneider to the Chippewa reservation wHere she was raised, only to find a new Bingo Palace in the place of her old day-care. There, we meet a jewelry salesman who incites us to believe, “Now that the White Buffalo is here, Art will be the thing that brings the world together.” Drawing on the most captivating chapters of her research, Schneider incorporates a scene from her earlier solo piece, Road Trip , described by the Los Angeles Times as “pure poetry, a soaring metaphoric counterpoint to the play’s recurrent theme about human desperation and the redemptive powers of art.” The scene: Schneider averts a rapist’s attack with an operatic aria, metaphorically reminding us of the power of the human voice to defend liberty. Blending the immediacy of a documentary with the intimacy of personal narrative, Freedom Of Speech captures a muffled underlying voice of America that we won’t hear anywhere else.
Warehouse Theatre
Greenville
Saturday, Nov. 10
8 pm
$35
After Show Party
food+music+cash bar

All proceeds go to the Cultural and Educational Outreach Programs of The Warehouse Theatre.