Prudential Life Insurance Company famously has had a rock, the mighty Rock of Gibraltar, as its logo for decades. Mary Ann Frank also has a rock as a talisman and symbol of strength. To learn about her fixture of permanency, you needed to attend her incredible world premiere at Stage II of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre until Sunday, June 23. Watch for it to appear at a stage near you.
Mary Ann Frank is an actress and singer and psychotherapist. She is also a wife, mother and now widow. She is telling her life story, with wit, poignancy and song and you will be the better for hearing it. From the time she first meets her blind date “Ralph honey” at a New York City library to that instant attraction, culminating in their elopement four years later, you will be charmed by Mary Ann Frank the storyteller and chanteuse.
Their marriage, home in New Haven, Connecticut, twins Lily and Lucas, careers, family and friends, are chapters in their saga of life, punctuated many years later by a devastating diagnosis of glioblastoma for Ralph that changes their goals and dreams dramatically. Without any attempt for pity, she reveals the realistic issues surrounding Ralph’s prognosis, injecting humor and a few well deserved tears in the bittersweet process. One moment they are empty nesters and the next they are fighting a battle royal for survival.
Always motivated by love, Mary Ann Frank paints a picture of their struggle, the remission, the hope the brain tumor won’t be fatal and then after his death she picks up the pieces, hugging her memories like a warm blanket and describes how to move on. The metaphor of “orienting to the rock,” of following a guide to the universe to traverse a path to a better pace where hope lives is evident. A reoccurring theme is the song “Zing went the strings of my heart” in happier times and the original melody “Due North” after she struggles to regain her balance after spinning off course. She declares this is not a cabaret or a musical, “it’s more a hybrid, a Prius.”
She also declares this is a team effort, crediting friends like Jeanine Pardey Levine and May Wuthrich for inspiration, her director Douglas Moser, her musical director and pianist Andrew Levine, production and lighting designer Andrew Rubenoff and choreographer Ginger Thatcher and many more.
Come be healed and restore your heart, as Mary Ann Frank spreads gratitude and love in her personal garden of hope and restorative blessings where resiliency is her fertilizer and the sun’s warmth is her constant.
What bullshit. MaryAnn Frank is a horrible person. It seems she left a lot out of her little “autobiographical” performance.
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