Kinfolk tales

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CORRECTION

A Sunday Journal article Sept. 17 included an incorrect reference to former North Carolina Lt. Gov. Bob Jordan. Jordan never served as governor.

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No one in the audience would pay a dime to be there, and the actors were doing the show at their own expense. But Wilmington playwright Anne Russell had more than money invested in the New York debut she planned last week for a production of her play, "The Porch."

Since she wrote it 23 years ago, it had been staged only for audiences who understood Southern family dynamics and would recognize the characters -- based on Russell's blood kin -- as being very much like the people who showed up at their own family reunions. Parading her aunt, uncles and grandparents, with their strengths and their flaws, before an audience of Northern strangers might expose them to ridicule. Whether the audience laughed at them, or recognized and accepted them, would be a test of Russell's skills as a writer.

She also hoped the performance would reconnect parts of her past long divided by the Mason-Dixon line.

For five years, from the time she was 5 years old, Russell had lived with her parents in New York's London Terrace, once the world's largest apartment complex. All those years, and for five more, she went back to Wilmington to spend the summer at her grandparents' home. "The Porch" is the story of something that happened there one evening after the end of World War II.

Now, at age 68, Russell had one shot to stage the play in New York, at 5 p.m. this past Thursday, not on Broadway or even off-Broadway, but in the gardens of London Terrace. Outdoors. With the weather forecast calling for rain.

"I'm calling awning and tent places to see if it's even possible to get one," a harried-sounding Russell said by phone Tuesday from the New York home of her literary agent. She also was worried about having enough food; on the playbill she promised "Southern-style refreshments," and Russell had spent hours in her kitchen near Wrightsville Beach making lemon bars and pecan tarts, which she managed to get onto the plane despite the most recent changes in security restrictions.

She made enough of these delicacies for maybe 50 people, the most she thought might turn out for a free showing of an obscure play. Now that she was in New York, however, the managers of London Terrace were saying they had rented 200 chairs.

"That many will come just for the free food," Ellen Bornet told her. Russell wondered if she could make ham biscuits.

It's just like Russell to do something like this, say the people who know her: Pour her heart out to put on a show for nothing, and feed the audience besides.

"That's my mom. That's what she does," says Sissie Twiggs, the second of Russell's four daughters, who lives in California. "She has a hundred balls in the air at the same time, and they're all important."

"God," says her husband, Howard Garriss, an architect. "If she could just give herself a break."

The matriarchal family

The dozen plays she has had produced may be the least of the drama in Anne Russell's life.

Russell was born in Raleigh to a manic-depressive father who worked for Southern Bell and a mother whose family has a 200-year history in Wilmington as gothic as the St. James Episcopal Church in which they were raised.

Her mother's was a matriarchal family, Russell says, governed always by the eldest woman, the iron hand in the velvet glove whose reign ends only when she dies and the next generation takes over. It was her Wilmington grandmother who stopped Russell's mother in her tracks when she said she wanted to become a professional dancer by telling her, "That's not what nice girls do."