Actress Rebecca Schaeffer (center) and her parents, Benson and Danna Schaeffer of Portland, in Vienna, Austria, in 1986. (Handout photo)
By Amy Wang | The Oregonian/OregonLive
The new play “You in Midair” starts in June 1989, when “everything was fabulous” for Portland playwright Danna Schaeffer and her family.
"We were all so happy, the three of us," Schaeffer recalled. She was teaching playwriting at Willamette University and writing a play. Her husband, Benson Schaeffer, was in private practice as a child psychologist. Their only child, Rebecca Schaeffer, a former Lincoln High School student, was a 21-year-old actress in Los Angeles, where she'd had a supporting role in the primetime television series "My Sister Sam" and appeared in the well-received feature film "Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills."
Danna and Benson Schaeffer in November 1989, four months after the killing of their daughter, Rebecca. (Brent Wojahn/1989)
Then, midday on July 18, the Schaeffers’ phone rang. Danna Schaeffer let the answering machine pick up the call. A few minutes later, she checked the message. It was from Tom Nunan, an ABC executive who was a friend of her daughter. “I thought they were planning a party,” she said. “I thought maybe a surprise party.” She called him back with a “sunny” voice.
But Nunan told Schaeffer that her daughter was dead, shot once in the chest by an obsessed fan who’d hired private detectives to find her address.
Danna Schaeffer speaks out in support of proposed gun restrictions in Multnomah County in December 1989. (Marv Bondarowicz/1989)
The killing made national headlines. It helped inspire a federal anti-stalking law, the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994. It turned Danna Schaeffer, briefly, into a gun-control activist who helped found Oregonians Against Gun Violence, now Ceasefire Oregon.
And it became an inextricable part of her life.
Danna Schaeffer in "You in Midair." (Owen Carey)
Schaeffer describes her response to losing her daughter in “You in Midair,” an 80-minute solo show that she initially presented as a staged reading titled “My Little Jezebel” in January during this year’s Fertile Ground Festival, a showcase for new works. “People loved it or responded very positively and powerfully,” she said.
Encouraged, Schaeffer added more content about her daughter and will put on a full production of the play from Oct. 5 through 15 at New Expressive Works in Southeast Portland. She talked recently with The Oregonian/OregonLive about “You in Midair”; here are highlights from the conversation.
On the title
“I succumbed to public pressure. Everybody hated the word ‘Jezebel’ because it sounded like a loose woman. It didn’t sound that way to me. … I combed Shakespeare. Nothing was quite, quite right. And so I landed on this bit of a lyric from ‘Send In the Clowns,’ which Rebecca sang in the talent show in the seventh grade.”
Danna Schaeffer talks about her new play, "You in Midair." (Amy Wang/Staff)
On the timing of the play
“The time has come,” Schaeffer said. On one hand, the passage of the years has eased her initial anguish, something she hadn’t wanted to believe would happen. “I wasn’t going to let go of it. But it does get softer.” On the other hand, she’s facing her own mortality. “I’m approaching the age my mother died ... and that, too, is both a release and a pressure. It’s like, wow, I’ve got a lot to get done before I die. And if not now, when?”
On the birth of the play
In a memoir writing workshop with Portland author Karen Karbo about two years ago, Schaeffer submitted a manuscript about her childhood in New York, with a final chapter about her daughter’s birth, life and death. “And Karen said, ‘You know what? You need to jettison most of the early chapters.’ She said, ‘This chapter is the interesting chapter.’
Schaeffer wasn’t immediately convinced. But then she spent some time with a friend of Karbo’s, performance artist Ann Randolph, who urged her to write a solo show, and consulted with an actor acquaintance, Michael Mendelson. Schaeffer also signed up for an acting class with Portland actor Chris Harder. “Chris teaches his classes based on the Meisner technique, and as I listened to the terms and the language he was using, I realized that’s what Rebecca studied in New York. So that was loads of fun, to think that I was following in her footsteps.”
“That’s how it got started.”
(Amy Wang/Staff)
On what to expect from the play
“I think life is tragic and hilarious and you get both of those in this show,” Schaeffer said. “It’s a sad story, what happened to Rebecca, it’s a tragic story, but there’s humor, a lot of humor in this.”
Schaeffer sings two songs and does some dancing as well.
On what she hopes audiences take away from the play
“I would like them to be entertained, to have 80 minutes of being engrossed. … And also to come away with a sense of Rebecca beyond the horror of her murder. I just hate to have her life defined by her death. I hope everybody gets something out of it that’s meaningful, and that they’re entertained.”
(Amy Wang/Staff)
"YOU IN MIDAIR"
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 5-15
Where: New Expressive Works, 810 S.E. Belmont St.
Tickets: $30-$35, brownpapertickets.com or 800-838-3006
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