“Memphis, Tennessee. A house with white pillars and black maids. Country clubs and aerobic classes. Drugs and murder. A story about the new South. Tragic, comic, startling.”
That’s the description on Rebecca Fisher’s Web page of her autobiographical, one-woman show, The Magnificence of the Disaster, and it’s on stage now. But you have to be in San Francisco to see it, and you need to be in San Francisco by March 25th. That’s when the show ends its successful run at the Marsh, a performance space on Valencia Street.
Fisher’s mother, Emily, was murdered in her Central Gardens home in 1995.
In his review, Rob Hurwitt of The San Francisco Chronicle called Fisher “an engagingly confiding performer [who] deftly shifts from her charmingly chatty or distressed self to a wide variety of characters of all ages, both sexes and black and white.” He goes on to call the show “smart, challenging, disarmingly funny and unmistakably affecting.”
Fisher grew up a daughter of privilege in Midtown Memphis, and in a house with white pillars on Central, her mother, Emily, was murdered. That was 12 years ago. Four years later, her younger brother, Adrian, died of a drug overdose. End of story? No. In January 2007, a suspect was convicted in the murder of Emily Fisher.
Fisher — an arts educator and stage performer, first in Chicago, then in San Francisco — began developing The Magnificence of the Disaster two years ago, and an early version of the piece appeared at the 2005 SF Fringe Festival. In June 2006, she was part of the Marsh’s Festival of New Voices. She’s been performing the show since January. No word, though, on plans for Fisher to bring it to her hometown, the scene of the crime.