Performer and writer Elizabeth LaPrade will bring her original one-woman show “Her Final Hour” to 33 Hawley in Northampton on Friday, Sept. 18, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 19, at 4 p.m.; and Sunday, Sept. 20, at 2 p.m. Each performance will be followed by a talkback with LaPrade, director Jean Devereux, and professionals whose work is concerned with some of the show’s major themes, including domestic violence, veterans, and the complexities of incarceration and human dignity.
The show is about Rose Ann Bowen, who sits alone in a prison cell in South Carolina in 1983. She’s been on death row for eight years, but her execution — her final hour — is nigh. As she waits, she reflects on the life experiences that brought her to prison.
“Especially in the current social climate, people are made to be absolutely bad or absolutely good, and this was an opportunity to look at, ‘Well, I don’t agree with all that person’s choices, but I’m gonna try and understand where they’re coming from and what happened,’” LaPrade said.
LaPrade first got the idea for the show when she had to write a monologue for an acting class she was taking in Philadelphia more than two decades ago, taught by the late George DiCenzo.
“One day, I thought, ‘I wonder what it would be like to be on death row,’” she said. There were two things about it that especially interested her: the notion of being stuck in an extremely repetitive day-to-day life and “what somebody might think of, what kind of transformation that they might have, as they’re looking death square in the face.”
Devereux recalled seeing Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman show on Broadway in 1984, in which Goldberg played a drug-addicted character named Fontaine.
“Most of it’s really funny, but there’s this moment where that character transforms and has just told all these horrible [things] about their life and looks right out to the audience and says, ‘You need to remember, I was once somebody’s little child.’ And everybody [gasps],” she said. She thought of Rose in the same way: “This person, whatever they did, at one point, they were somebody’s beloved little girl.”
LaPrade plays all eight characters in the show, including Rose Ann, her mother and father, and her husband Daniel, among others. She distinguishes them not with costumes, but with her voice and physicality. “Mama,” for example, sits with her legs pressed tightly together; Daniel looms over her.
“As we started working on the script more and more, [each character’s physical characteristics] started emerging, and then one day, I was like, ‘You know what, that doesn’t feel like Daddy anymore, so let’s drop that,’ and the same thing with some of the others,” LaPrade said.
“It was a lot of work for Elizabeth to integrate all those different people into her body,” Devereux said with a laugh.
LaPrade chose Bowen’s inmate number, 314271, on purpose: all of the numbers add up to 18, and one plus eight equals nine, a number that represents completion in numerology. (The number 18 also represents life in Hebrew, though LaPrade said she wasn’t aware of that when she wrote the show.)
This show also marks LaPrade’s debut as a playwright, which she said feels “exciting, terrifying, [and] kind of expansive.” Devereux summed it up as, “Everything’s on the line.”
“I think that there’s something very special and important in that. … It’s very exciting, and then sometimes, I’m still like, ‘What the hell [am] I thinking?” LaPrade said.
At a rehearsal on Thursday, Sept. 3, LaPrade and Devereux showed the Gazette a handful of scenes from the show, but on purpose, not any scenes that would explain exactly why Bowen ended up in prison.
Nonetheless, we see snippets from a life filled with trauma: a father who abuses her mother; a partner who, in today’s parlance, love-bombs Rose on their first date at an Italian restaurant (“Every time I mention something I like, turns out, he likes it, too!” she says), then later accuses her of cheating when he finds her longtime best friend Dolly’s new phone number written on a cocktail napkin.
“Looking down on me, he smiles and slowly moves to an inch from my face – ‘I. Don’t. Believe you. In fact, I don’t think you need this number anymore.’ Staring me in the eyes, he slowly rips up the napkin bit by bit. A wave of fear creeps through my body as the pieces of paper tumble to the ground at my feet,” Rose says.
And all that, of course, is before she even reaches the trauma of the prison system itself.
“My hope is that [audiences] connect to their empathy through this show,” Devereux said. She actually has a family member serving a very long prison sentence. “It’s so easy to just judge that person and walk away, but I know his background story, and he still has issues he’s responsible for.”
“[It’s] sort of a ‘there but for the grace of God’ moment, you know what I mean?” she added. “We’re not saying that a person who commits a horrendous crime [is innocent]. … It’s not about that. It’s about just looking at how, maybe, they got there.”
Tickets are $12.68 to $33.30, fees included. To purchase tickets or for more information, visit theticketing.co/e/herfinalhour. This show is recommended for ages 16 and up and contains references to or depictions of domestic violence, sexual assault, incarceration, and murder.
