Letters to the Past : Exploring Relationships of a California Dynasty

Joan Hotchkis is like a baserunner turning for home but then making the terrible discovery that she has missed a base. Gone wide at one corner. So she stops, turns and heads back, retracing the wild journey, getting through the confusion and the chase the right way this time.

We’ll leave the final call to some mythical umpire since the sixtysomething actress-writer and now producer is still out there running, shaking off the tag, going over old territories in new ways.

Hotchkis is a television, stage and film actress who two years ago borrowed moments from three generations of her family’s history--the Bixbys and the Hotchkises who owned massive ranching hunks of Los Angeles County real estate--and turned an authentic late-19th-Century, early-20th-Century dynasty into a late-20th-Century one-person feminist performance piece.

Performance piece. That’s right, she says. Not a play, not theater.

Theater, she says, can put you to sleep, and often does. Performance art wakes you up. Taunts you, keeps you awake. The veteran actress knows about the rigors and requirements of traditional performances. Now it’s time to strike out in new directions, make a mark, make a declaration of sorts.

So she is back in the old territory tonight--Pasadena--with the first of weekend performances at an unlikely location, the Armory, of her singular attraction, “Tearsheets: Letters I Didn’t Send Home.” She’s hoping to wake up more of the old crowd, the folks from San Marino where she lived and Pasadena where she went to school.

Hotchkis is interesting not only because she took a discovered 1912 diary of her mother, the once-secret poetry of her grandmother, some family snapshots and her own memories and turned them into a 75-minute play (performance piece, if you will) that raises contemporary issues about--hold on--cowboys, cattle breeding, gender, race and class. But she is also equally interesting when it comes to the direction in which she is heading, and what she plans on doing with her performance piece.

About a year ago with her two partners--production manager Elizabeth Murtaugh and associate producer Mitchell Mills--she formed Tearsheets Productions, set up shop and studio in Santa Monica, has kept her one-woman show “Tearsheets” on the road while planning a variety of show business adventures, video productions, workshops and publications.

First though, about the word “Tearsheets,” Hotchkis provides several clues: what you tear from a newspaper, a clipping, a memory; a symbolic bed sheet torn in anger; a nautical term rooted in entanglements; a word-play on the spelling of tear , as in tears.

Sheets play another role in her one-woman presentation. Images from her family--pastoral scenes, cowboys at work, family gatherings--are projected on bedsheets as she moves through her production.

How much of her work is personal history? How true to her family’s story does she stay?

“It is a history of a family,” she says of the Bixby-Hotchkis clan that once owned 26,000 acres of ranchland in Los Alamitos and Long Beach as well as in the San Gabriel Valley. “But it’s more an exposing of a family history, a questioning. We show love, honor, generosity, but what else do we have here? Here is California cattle-ranching and dynasty values. And there is racism and sexism, tyranny, benevolent tyranny. There are abuses, but I stay true to my own history. I look at how patriarchy works on children and women and how it tries to have people disassociate themselves from their bodies.

“Are there parallels between the raising of cattle and the raising of women?” She recalls returning earlier this year to Pasadena’s exclusive Westridge School for Girls where she was honored as a distinguished graduate and telling the audience of one personal, patriarchal experience. She had come home from school where her class had been studying the New Deal and spoke enthusiastically at the dinner table about what she had learned--Tennessee Valley Authority, Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps.

“It was a conventional setting for that period,” she says. “The family dinner table, a mahogany table, candelabra, father way at one end, mother at the other, siblings evenly spaced between, a scene every woman in that audience knew because they had all been there. Upper-middle-class dining.

“Suddenly my father’s fork crashed to the dinner table. ‘That’s hogwash, Joanie,’ he said. He told me that Roosevelt was ruining this country and he launched forth in a typical male political monologue. It was the way fathers were and some still are.

“I never again talked politics with my father.

“It showed me how a voice can be silenced by the culture. If it’s not the family history, the family policy, it’s hogwash. Over and out.

“And when I finished that story at Westridge so many women came up to me afterward and said that their fathers were just like that. They had silenced them.”

She believes her production may break some silences, may cause people to question what they have learned. “We talk but we often don’t say what we feel. We don’t dare,” she says.

Her work has taken on its own life. Since “Tearsheets” was introduced two years ago at Highways in Santa Monica, it has been on the road, this year in the Northeast and Southwest, particularly, being changed and altered as audiences reacted to it. After this week’s Pasadena engagement, “Tearsheets” will be part of the opening program later this month at UCLA’s National Women’s Theater Festival, then from mid-August to Sept. 5 Hotchkis will be performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.

She plans on continuing to tour the program--it requires just herself, her two partners, five suitcases of props and projectors “and two electrical outlets”--but she has other plans for her company. Her next performance piece will be about women cowboys, she says, one that will incorporate video interviews with contemporary working cattle-ranch women.

At the same time, she is developing what she calls her Elder Project, another attempt “to free the voices our culture has silenced.” As she examined her cultural upbringing through her family’s history, she is planning a series of personal histories with older people, having them convey through recorded conversations or songs or dances what their histories are about.

Box-office receipts pay some of “Tearsheet’s” expenses. Some investors have been found and grants are being pursued for her future projects. Hotchkis is hoping the exposure of her performance piece might interest a television producer, particularly public broadcasting.

She knows television, having appeared in several series and dramas, including the role of Jack Klugman’s girlfriend in “The Odd Couple” following a stage career in New York. She wrote and produced the 1975 film “The Legacy” and 10 years ago in New York she wrote and acted in her first one-woman presentation, “Bissie at the Baths,” produced by Joan Tewkesbury, the story of “a middle-class woman who has lost her sense of direction in society and has a nervous breakdown.”

Now, through her “Tearsheets,” Joan Hotchkis has found her new sense of direction, heading for home again.