Stephanie Cotton-Snell felt a sense of unease almost immediately after moving to downtown Boston from a Cincinnati suburb 3 1/2 years ago.
Her new apartment was comfortable, but there was a problem with the neighborhood. Cotton-Snell was constantly running into homeless people, the same individuals, day in and day out. She had noticed the homeless in Cincinnati when she ventured into the city, of course, but in Boston it was personal because now the homeless were living in her community.
"It seemed unconscionable to me to continue to walk by them every day and not really do something," she said.
Throughout her career, the 44-year-old actress had witnessed the power of the arts to heal, bring joy, and raise self-esteem. She wondered if she could use her own experiences in regional, community, and Christian theater to benefit those less well off. Cotton-Snell discovered she could and created Girl Talk Theatre, dedicated to empowering marginalized women, struggling with poverty and homelessness, through performance.
Since September, Cotton-Snell has been teaching acting classes twice a week - at Rosie's Place in the South End and at On The Rise in Cambridge - to women with little, if any, experience in theater. She plans to extend the program to other sites in the Boston area serving the poor and homeless.
The first year of Girl Talk Theatre is being funded by the Kip Tiernan Social Justice Fellowship, which honors the work of the founder of Rosie's Place. When it opened in 1974, Rosie's Place was believed to be the first women's homeless shelter and drop-in center in the country.
"Years and years ago, we really wanted everything for the women, and we knew eventually we would get everything that they needed. . . . We should have been doing this theater stuff a long time ago," said Kip Tiernan.
One Tuesday afternoon last month, in a borrowed space on the third floor of a church around the corner from Rosie's Place, a small group of budding actresses started warming up. As sunshine poured in through the large windows of the room at the Congregation Lion of Judah, the women rolled their shoulders forward and back, forward and back, and pulled their faces into exaggerated "happy lion" and "sad lion" expressions.
"Don't ignore tension. Acknowledge it and get rid of it!" Cotton-Snell told the women.
Soon the Girl Talk Theatre director, with a rosy complexion, red shoulder-length hair, and a generous smile, was introducing a theatrical game for her charges - all guests of Rosie's Place - and asking them to suggest positive and negative words common to the group. It was not an easy task for women who fiercely eschew labels and are loath to be pitied. Cotton-Snell challenged her budding actresses to mold one another like clay into "sculptures" that depicted the words they had chosen.
Lois Frazier, who was wearing bright red-orange lipstick, grabbed Agnes Weathers, a woman sporting a green hat and matching pants, and shaped her body into an image intended to evoke the word "hopeful." In turn, Weathers placed both of Frazier's hands on Frazier's face to signify "abuse."
At the end of the exercise, each woman described how the pose made her feel.
"I felt great," responded Weathers, enthusiastically.
"I felt like I was being pushed around, shaken up," replied 51-year-old Frazier, in a tone colored by personal experience.
As a little girl, Frazier had dreamed of becoming an actress or a singer, if only as a way to escape her broken home life. She forgot about her ambition as she got "caught up in the street life and the smoking, drinking, drugging, and abusive relationships" that accompanied the lifestyle. "I didn't have time to play with my dolls and things like a lot of the other young girls did."
Today, Frazier is clean and sober, has a safe place to live, food in her refrigerator, and some money in her pocket. She said she suffers from depression and finds the theater classes therapeutic. "I need to be around positive women, and I need to really know how to socialize with women once again in a healthy way and also to trust women once again."
The women of Girl Talk Theatre will give their first public performance, called "It's All About Us," this month. Cotton-Snell said she believes the production, based on the personal stories participants have shared in class, would challenge stereotypes of poverty and homelessness.
To create the show, Cotton-Snell has borrowed techniques from someone with decades of experience creating theater with marginalized people: the Brazilian director Augusto Boal. Another method that has proved effective is the Meisner Technique, developed by renowned American drama instructor Sanford Meisner, whose "imaginary monologue" exercise gives participants a chance to return to a moment in their past when somebody said something hurtful and to respond in a way they were unable to at the time.
Claire Fleming, a woman with finely painted red fingernails and an air of elegance, chose a day in the summer of 1991 for the exercise; it was the summer she had moved to Boston and suddenly found herself homeless. A stranger asked her, "What are you doing just sitting around? Why aren't you out there looking for a job?" Fleming, who had worked almost her whole adult life and had never been dependent on anyone, was speechless.
"A lot of people think that homelessness just means being without a home," she said. "Let me tell you, it is so much more than being without a home. You're not the same person that you were before becoming homeless. You feel disenfranchised. Your self-esteem has plummeted to the ground, and you feel almost invisible. Does anyone see me? Does anyone know I'm here? That is exactly how I felt at that particular time."
Fleming, who calls herself the senior, senior citizen of the group, has come a long way since her first summer in Boston. For the past 16 years, she has lived in permanent housing at Rosie's Place. She said the imaginary monologue exercise was a real boost, because it had given her an opportunity to finally have her say.
As the light outside the large windows of the rehearsal room started to diminish, a woman with long braids that peeked out from under a large white hat stood up to speak. It was time for Judy Davis to share her story.
Everyone was silent as the 53-year-old former drug addict, now a certified substance-abuse counselor, poured out her heart. It was not long before her voice started to break and she began to sob. Someone handed Davis a box of tissues, and she continued.
Outside of class, she explained that she had gained a tremendous amount from Girl Talk Theatre. "I've been able to just express myself without any judgments," said Davis, who hopes her performance this month will help other women struggling with addiction. "I want them to know that they can get past this, and then maybe one day they'll be up in the acting class and be able to tell their story."
"It's All About Us" will be performed at Rosie's Place, 889 Harrison Ave., at 2 p.m. Jan 20. Tickets or reservations are not required. For more information, e-mail info@GirlTalkTheatre.org or call 857-294-9750.
