Drama Queens, a five-star arts journal focusing on female artists

Death is knocking on the door of ninety-two-year-old Mamie Rae, except she isn’t quite ready to leave. Before she makes her way into the afterlife, Mamie wants to fulfill her lifelong dream of being an actress. But instead of a camera crew and production set, she addresses an audience from the stage at American Theatre of Actors on West 54th, taking them through the scenes of her life: a marriage, domestic routines, a brief stint as a farmhand, motherhood, old age. This one-woman, ninety-minute show rests entirely on the shoulders of Laura Hooper, who also based the script on her late grandmother’s memoir.

Hooper’s performance as Mamie — and as Mamie’s spiritual guide, the mystical force responsible for ushering her into the afterlife — is stunning. Through subtle, swift shifts in body language, she moves between the two personas seamlessly. The audience is invited to watch the mechanics of acting up close, and rather than exposing theatre’s basic premise as make-believe, we leave inspired by how one person can embody fictional lives while leaving their own personhood entirely off the stage. This is what I love about solo shows: moments like these are gems, pulling back the curtain on the act of channeling itself. It left me wondering whether Hooper might have woven in more characters, to give the stage even more dynamism.

Over the course of the play, Hooper calls audience members up to help her tell Mamie’s story as she works through it. These moments seem intended to break the fourth wall and deepen our immersion, but I found they had the opposite effect. By handing audience members a role in shaping Mamie’s memories, the show pulled me out of the dreamspace Hooper had worked so hard to build. The relationship between performer and audience grows fragile in these stretches, wavering between the intimacy of a casual chat among friends and the gravity of an artistic reckoning with death.

The play reaches its climax when Mamie’s spiritual guide refuses to be put off any longer and insists that she pass through the eternal gates. The vulnerability Hooper brings to this final push is raw and affecting. Altogether, the show sits in a wonderful tension between a life as it was hoped for and a life as it was actually lived.