‘Emancipation’ Proclamation

Wendy Robie makes her living primarily by sending shivers of spooky or horrific fun down the collective spine of the TV-viewing and moviegoing public.

Starting 10 years ago with her career-making role as Nadine, the obsessive, eyepatch-wearing, superhumanly strong housewife on “Twin Peaks,” Robie has been typecast in Hollywood as a good actor to have around when the going gets scary and weird.

She played an evil mommy in her biggest movie hit, “The People Under the Stairs,” and will succumb from a bludgeoning with a typewriter in the next of her many horror-flick turns, “The Attic Expedition.”

The enthusiastic, cheerful talker gaily summed it up as: “I’ve cut off a man’s hand and fed it to my dog. I’ve murdered a variety of people, and been murdered.”

But Robie, with bright red hair cropped short around a memorably angular face that intimates a Cubist’s conception of the human visage, stakes her claim as an artist on something far removed from her collection of entertaining horrors. Passion, idealism and artistic ambition have driven her to take on one of American history’s starkest horrors--slavery in the antebellum South--in her new one-woman play, “The Emancipation of Fanny Kemble.”

The 90-minute stage production, playing Friday at Orange Coast College, dramatizes a journal kept by Kemble. Born into a lofty British theatrical family in 1809, she became the English-speaking world’s leading actress at 21, inspiring a cult of celebrity to rival anything our age has produced.

At 26, she was a bestselling memoirist, retired from the stage and married to a wealthy, dashing Philadelphian she fell for while touring the United States. At 29, her life was transformed when her husband, Pierce Butler, claimed his inheritance: cotton and rice plantations on two Georgia coastal islands. They fed off the labor of more than 700 slaves.

Robie adapted her show from “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation,” which Kemble, a fervent abolitionist, wrote in revulsion at what she found during a four-month visit to her husband’s holdings. Historians regard the journal as one of the most important, reliable and unsparing accounts of what daily life was like for African American slaves and their overlords. Kemble befriended slaves by caring for them at the plantation infirmary and doing other kindnesses, and they entrusted her with their stories.

Authors who have researched the life of Kemble liken her to Elizabeth Taylor for her beauty, to Jane Fonda for her acting bloodlines and political bent, to Oskar Schindler for her humane instincts in the face of an historical abomination and to Princess Diana for the impact of her celebrity.

Robie had never heard of Kemble until two years ago, even though she had a master’s degree in English and American literature, earned before her belated quest, starting in her mid-30s, to realize a long-deferred dream of acting.

In 1997, Anne Ludlum, an old friend of Robie’s from Seattle, where Robie launched her acting career, sent her the script to “Shame the Devil! An Audience With Fanny Kemble.” Ludlum wrote the one-woman play nearly 20 years ago after stumbling upon Kemble while rummaging through the card catalog at the Seattle public library.

Ludlum, who used to perform the show herself, hoped Robie could play Kemble and get it produced by Will & Company, the Los Angeles theater ensemble where Robie regularly acted and directed.

“I guess all of us who bumped into [Kemble] feel, ‘My goodness, why isn’t this woman known, and why isn’t this book [the plantation journal] part of what we all read?” Ludlum recalled over the phone from her home. Robie was enthralled, and gave several performances of “Shame the Devil!” But Ludlum’s play spanned most of Kemble’s life, including her early rise to fame in England, and Robie felt the heroine’s confrontation with slavery deserved a play of its own. So she condensed Kemble’s thick journal into “Emancipation.”

“The people of Butler Island spoke to me and demanded I bear witness for them,” Robie said. “I believe race is the great social problem of the 20th century. We did not solve it, and we are doomed to grapple with it in the 21st century. We must hear each other’s stories. If we could truly experience one another, we could end bigotry. If I can get people to sit in a room for 90 minutes and take this journey, they will be changed profoundly.”

Robie paused and laughed at her high-flown words. “Now I seem completely foolish, but that’s how I feel.”

Kemble was a reluctant star, wanting to write, not act, until she was pressed onto the stage by her father to recoup his fortune after the theater he owned, Covent Garden, went broke (the gambit worked, and then some). Later, Kemble suppressed her plantation journal for years after writing it, fearful that publication would destroy her failing marriage and sever all contact with her two daughters.

“Her need to be free to follow her art, and the terrible price you have to pay, spoke to me,” Robie said.

Like Kemble’s, Robie’s early artistic urges ran afoul of family imperatives. She grew up in a close-knit family in Auburn, Calif. Early on, she was smitten with a desire to act, but her parents and grandparents wouldn’t have it. They wanted her to enter a solid profession, or go to work for the savings and loan that the family owned. Instead, Robie lit out at age 18 for acting school, gravitated to New York City, and returned to Auburn at 21 as the divorced mother of a 2-year-old girl.

“I said, ‘OK, you win.’ My family gave me a monthly allowance, and I went back to school [studying English in hopes of becoming a professor] and raised Samantha.”

In 1982, while on her daily five- to 10-mile run (a regimen she continues), Robie says she stopped at the College of Marin, saw a notice about a drama department meeting, and impulsively went in. Jim Dunn, the department chairman, was giving a pep talk to theater students about carrying on despite Proposition 13 cutbacks in the budget for staging plays. Robie said his speech about the importance of the arts moved her to tears. Soon she was taking acting classes and performing in college plays.

On Dunn’s advice, Robie moved to Seattle and became part of the theater scene there. That put her in a position to audition for the “Twin Peaks” pilot, shot in Washington state. Director David Lynch had her tryout for the role of Nadine; her screen test found her pulling feverishly on some window blinds--one of Nadine’s prime obsessions.

“It was a sight gag, and I could hear David laughing. I told myself, ‘Wendy, don’t you stop,’ and I kept pulling until my fingers were bleeding. I think because of that, Nadine went on to her strange little story.”

When “Twin Peaks” became a cult hit, Robie had her moment of mobbed-in-supermarkets fame but kept it in perspective. “I knew from the beginning it was a fluke, an interesting, fun thing that happened.”

She doesn’t consider her ensuing typecasting in horror films an albatross. “I really enjoy doing those movies. I’m always glad to work. When somebody offers me a job, I usually say, ‘Yes, please. Yes, please.’ The occasional paycheck is wonderful. But [theater] is my art.”

Robie, who lives in Glendale, hopes to take the production around the country, aiming for a collegiate circuit rather than a long run at a single theater. Friday night’s performance will be her 19th since launching “Emancipation” last December; next month she has a two-week stand in Evanston, Ill., which she hopes will be reviewed and give the play’s profile a boost.

It is no breezy evening at the theater, she said.

“Fanny walks into the infirmary on Butler Island the first day and sees a chamber of horrors, lakes of blood on the floor. There’s torture and murder and rape. I don’t think it’s for children younger than 13.”

Robie’s play is a huge acting challenge. She doesn’t just soliloquize as Fanny Kemble, but, a la Anna Deveare Smith, she assumes the personae of 20 other characters from the “Journal”--black and white, male and female, strong and crippled, 10 years old to 80.

Reactions From Blacks, Whites Have Been Positive Overall

So far, she said, black people in audiences--including one substantially integrated house at Long Beach City College--have reacted positively in the discussions she holds after each show. “Every time an African American person embraces me [for the play], that blesses me,” she said.

And what would Fanny Kemble--who is about to enjoy a revival that includes a Showtime cable channel movie next year starring Jane Seymour, plus a new biography and a fresh edition of her journals--say if she saw Robie trying to bring her and her writings back to life?

“I think Fanny would be amused,” Robie said. “‘What is this redheaded stork doing playing me?’ But once she knew what I was up to, I think she would approve.”

* “The Emancipation of Fanny Kemble,” Friday at the Orange Coast College Drama Lab, 2701 Fairview St., Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $5. (714) 432-5640, Ext. 1.