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The Mad Scientistįour days later, Schneider welcomes me into the room she calls her “little lair” in the finished basement of her in-laws’ house in Mission Hills, where she and her man are living. Within five minutes, I know the Cliffs Notes version of her long-distance love story, and how, after decades in Los Angeles and New York, she ended up in San Diego. It’s this latter part of me that thrills when, during one particularly long conversation between the director, the tech director, and the projections designer, Schneider plunks herself in the seat next to me and whips out her phone to show me pictures of her two-year-old son, Raiden. One part of me is dying to ask, “How did you do that?” And another part thinks, She’s amazing. I watch while, with little more than a voice change and a single gesture (putting her hair up, taking her hair down, putting on or taking off a hat or an overshirt), she transforms from Vanessa to Celina, Celina to Paula, Paula to Ronny, and so on. In the New York Times, reviewer Bruce Weber called them “astonishing transformations.” I have to agree. Several times, the stage manager calls for Schneider to perform those transitional moments when she morphs from one character to the next.

Schneider nods her understanding, and when the stage manager is ready, she repeats the line, as she will again four times in the next ten minutes.Īlthough I have always liked a good one-woman or one-man show, I don’t expect to find myself so riveted by the incomplete 30-second bits that, over the next hour, will introduce me to Vanessa, the prostitute from Nevada Celina, a “Little Miss” Pageant runner-up from Georgia Paula, a “Virgin Mary enthusiast” from Connecticut Ronny, a Christian medical student from Massachusetts and Heidi, a dominatrix medical student from California.

It’s hard to tell whether she’s having a moment of total un-self-consciousness or one of extreme self-consciousness.Īfter a few seconds, the director looks up from her laptop and says to Schneider, “I’m losing the part about you applying for a job. While the stage manager converses with the sound guy, Schneider stands in a pool of light shaking her hips and wiggling her body for no one in particular. So I applied for a job.”Īnother voice says, “Hold, Eliza,” from somewhere behind me in the darkened theater. I choose a seat closest to the door and watch as she steps into a pair of black patent leather fuck-me pumps and says, “I didn’t know how else to get into the Mustang Ranch. A low yellowish light emanates from the control room at the back of the theater.Įveryone is quiet except for Schneider, who is onstage.

Aside from the stage lights, the only other light in the theater comes from the blue glow of laptops on the faces of the director and a couple of tech people in random seats here and there.

#Eliza schneider images full#

When I enter Diversionary Theatre, a 108-seat black-box theater in University Heights, the tech rehearsal is already in full swing.