Fatal Attraction in the play 'The Kid of D'

The first time that Seattle-based actor Renata Friedman read "The K of D," for a workshop four years ago, she fell hard for the script. Tall, gangly and sometimes misunderstood, Friedman identified with Skinny Charlotte McGraw, the lonely, supernatural girl at the center of the play.

"All through school, I'd always been cast as a boy or some androgynous type," said Friedman, a lifelong actor and graduate of New York University. "Directors have never known what to do with me. That's partly why I like new plays. I was instantly drawn to this one because I know this alienated, skinny girl with this unusual gift."

In Laura Schellhardt's one-person play, subtitled "an urban legend," Charlotte's "gift" is something she supposedly received from kissing her dying brother. Charlotte now has the power, through pursing her own lips, to end life. That's what the people in St Marys, Ohio, believe, anyway.

"I find ghost stories, and the concept behind them, intriguing," said Schellhardt, head of the undergraduate playwriting program at Northwestern University. "There's this yearning to communicate with or be visited by someone who's long gone. Plus they're cautionary tales, reminding us that our time's scarce and we should be careful with it."

Schellhardt, the daughter of a Wall Street Journal reporter and teacher, also was up to something else with this play, which opens today at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis.

"I find it difficult to be scared in the theater," she said. "It's easier to creep people out in film, where you can zoom in and out. But I said, hey, these stories ultimately come from the campfire, which is an intimate style of theater, so we should take them back."

Scary or sweet, Charlotte is the medium for "K of D," sharing her tale and those of other characters in her small town.

Turned down, not defeated

For the actor, whose father owned an art-house movie theater in Port Townsend, Wash., when she was growing up, no barrier could separate her from the work that first made her swoon. The 17 characters that she has to do onstage with only herself as the scene partner? No problem, she said; the more the merrier. After working with playwright Schellhardt during the play-development process, Friedman had a cold-water-in-the-face moment. A production arose, the world premiere, at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C. She was not chosen to play Charlotte.

Naturally, Friedman was upset -- how could they go with someone else, she thought, when she was the one to help bring the characters alive in the workshops? But instead of just getting angry, she decided to be productive. Friedman became a producer for the first (and, so far, only) time in her life.

She set about raising money in her arts-loving hometown. She interviewed many directors and hired Abraham, for whom she had once auditioned, unsuccessfully. And she starred in the production in Seattle.

"I didn't know what I was getting into -- being box office, marketing, cleanup crew, everything," she said, intimating that she would not try that again.

"We build it anew each time," she said, as Abraham nodded in agreement. "There is so much to explore."

Quicksilver turns

"Renata is a fluid actress with an incredible sense of humor -- you can't play a teenager without that," said Schellhardt. "And she's an incredibly physical performer who approaches these characters physically first, then distills them into their essences."

Friedman's approach and passion were obvious during a recent rehearsal in the Illusion's dimly lit auditorium, where Friedman, onstage, walked on and off a broken-down gangplank that is part of the set. (The rest of the set during that rehearsal was made up of brown, waist-high prairie grass.) Director Abraham sat in the audience, consulting a diary-style notebook in which he had scribbled notes.

Actor and director were working on blocking, complemented by lights and loud sounds. With seeming ease, Friedman did quicksilver switches between the mostly male characters that she was rehearsing, using gestures, vocal inflections and mood shifts to draw them.