Sisterhood author Wells set for solo show at Rep

Millions of people know Rebecca Wells. The Alexandria, La., native's second book, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, sold millions and was turned into a movie starring Sandra Bullock. At 7 p.m. Friday (and Saturday and Sunday) at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, the erstwhile actor debuts a one-woman show based on the book and her own life.

In 1999, Wells didn't need the kind of celebrity Malcolm Gladwell and The New Yorker bestow, but Gladwell dabbed his quill and inked Wells into a piece called "The Science of the Sleeper." It wasn't the success of Wells and the Ya-Yas that inspired him but the sleepy success of it, and the awakening is credited -- by Gladwell and again last week by Wells -- to Mary Gay Shipley in Blytheville.

In 1993, Shipley had been turned on to Wells' first book, Little Altars Everywhere. "It was the kind of book where you could say, 'You'll love it. Take it home,'" she told Gladwell, who added, almost goose-pimpled, "The No. 1 author at That Bookstore in Blytheville in 1993 was John Grisham, as was the case in nearly every bookstore in the country. But No. 2 was Rebecca Wells."

Shipley -- and there were others -- is to thank for what happened next, which was a slow rising wave of organic enthusiasm following the 1996 publication of Ya-Ya, but credit Wells, too, for her tireless tour of book readings and signings, when she would bear up like a trained actress, which is exactly what she is.

Wells' return to the stage Friday is remarkable, not because 63-year-old New York Times best-selling authors don't generally act their characters out, but because in 1998 she began a more than seven-year journey through the neurological vicissitudes of Lyme disease. Her symptoms included fatigue, light and sound sensitivity, respiratory infections and seizures, according to a 2005 USA Today story.

"I wasn't in the shape I was in before Lyme, but I was younger then, too. So, I feel like I'm up to it, yeah."

Wells was born into a cotton farming family on the banks of the Red River. For most of her childhood, she attended Our Lady of Prompt Succor, named for the patron saint of Louisiana. "It was not until I was 40 that I understood why the public school kids laughed when, as a cheerleader, I called out 'Go, Prompt Succor! Go, Prompt Succor!'"

Wells applied to Bennington and Amherst colleges but ended up at the University of Georgia, then Louisiana State University, where she and several other women founded a chapter of the National Organization for Women she says, about the same time the state Legislature was weighing ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. She graduated with a degree in theater.

"I was sort of one of those girls saved by theater," she says. "There's a whole phenomenon of kids who are saved by theater. They are the so-called misfits, but they're creative, and they find in theater a whole new family."

After graduating she tried to make a living on stages in New York, Boston and regional theaters, but, "I was memorizing Portia in Merchant of Venice ... and then it became clear to me that everything is based on body. I'm petite and I was being cast in perky ingenue roles. They were not big enough for my spirit."

By the end of the 1980s she was transitioning from the stage to the page. She had the manuscript for her first book, Little Altars Everywhere. She got a grant that functionally paid a press to print her. "I had money and nobody would publish me. I was going up to people, 'Here, I have a grant. I'll give you some money,' and no one would publish it. I think that's when I had my first panic attack."

She persuaded a tiny Seattle press known largely for publishing translated Japanese poetry to take her money in exchange for a 5,000-copy run. It won the Western States Book Award, and that helped it hop along the shelves of some independent bookstores like Shipley's.

BACK TO THE STAGE

Wells plans to introduce to the stage some autobiography folded into a performance of the imagined characters her fans will recognize. The Ya-Yas are based on a group of her mother's close friends called the He-Hes.

The production -- music, set, effects -- will be spare. "I'm definitely interested in doing work that's very simple in production values. To me, the most interesting thing is flat-out storytelling."

The author is openly concerned about the audience the show will appeal to. Her natural constituency is book-clubbing white women, but she wishes for lots of men, and blacks and whites. "Mixed race audiences are so rare we stop thinking about it."

She plans on performing a black character on stage.

"I've just become increasingly aware that that's a conversation I want to have," she says.

How did this performance land in Little Rock? A year ago Wells was living on Bainbridge Island across Puget Sound from Seattle when she visited Little Rock for a three-day wedding weekend and stayed for a month. She met with the theater's artistic director, Bob Hupp, and he was enthusiastic.

She recently moved to Nashville, Tenn., in part because of that trip. "I'd missed the South. I missed seeing colorful birds in the dead of winter in the bare branches. I missed the friendliness. Somebody calling me 'baby' as they checked out my groceries at the Kroger."

BACK, ONCE MORE

Wells began framing up the book that eventually became Little Altars Everywhere in 1987 while convalescing from an injury performing a theater piece she'd also written (a vehicle for herself) called Gloria Duplex. That piece is about an erotic dancer who sees Jesus in the mirrored ball above the dance floor -- "a piece about holiness found in territory normally held by the devil."

"I want to come back to the Rep and do that play, OK?"

Style on 02/16/2016