One-Woman Show — Studio C

“One-woman show goes from highway to stage,” The Daily Cardinal, October 29, 1998

Eliza Schneider, star of the one-woman show USA 911, which opens tonight at the Civic Center’s Starlight Room, has a hypothesis.

“I think that we have exponential potential for success,” she said in a recent interview, “and we have exponential potential for doom. You can communicate with everyone in the world, but you can’t get intimate with anyone.”

Five years ago, Schneider, then a third-year student at UCLA, decided to do something about that. “I had taken off my fall quarter to finish filming ‘Beakman’s World,’” said Schneider, who plays the lab assistant “Liza” on the CBS Saturday morning program. “And then I had my first free month off ever and I said to myself, 'Self, what do you want to do with your first free month off ever?’ So I bought a used ambulance and a DAT recorder and a wok, and I set out to interview everyone in America.”

Intimately acquainting herself with many different kinds of people and their various dialects, Schneider returned home seven weeks and 27,000 miles later with the substance for not only her one-woman show, originally titled “I’m Not Weird,” but the research thesis for her world arts and cultures major as well.

The thesis earned only a “C,” but the show was clearly the beginning of something more meaningful. “I ended up taking nine subsequent trips and putting 103,000 miles on my ambulance,” Schneider said.

Already a seasoned actress with more than two dozen plays and two TV series roles to her credit, Schneider has taken on the imposing task of recreating some of the unique personalities and dialects she encountered, fashioning 25 stage characters from the more than 400 people she interviewed.

“What I have attempted to do is blend the genre of documentary theater, just by keeping the monologues of these characters as verbatim as possible within the context of the piece — with personal narratives, [by] taking people on my journey with me and allowing them to take on these people’s perspectives as I did.”

Inevitably, USA 911 has been more for Eliza Schneider than simply a vehicle for her protean talents. “The neat thing about the experience is that it actually happened to me. I have a unique perspective now, just by having really listened to these people. I was a die-hard liberal feminist type; now, I’m perfectly willing to be friends with your average hunter in West Virginia.”