Katy woman writes first play

After almost 30 years in community theater, Sarah St. John started writing a play. Her script, Gertie's Boys, will be unveiled in a staged reading at 7 p.m. Sunday, March 27, in Town & Country Village, across from City Centre.

Gertie's Boys is the final play in this year's 19th annual New Play Reading Series at Country Playhouse, 12802 Queensbury. Admission is free and the public is invited.

"I'm particularly pleased to be presenting this one," said Diana Howie, coordinator of the readings. Not only have St. John and her husband, Bill St. John, been active volunteers at the playhouse, but Sarah was diagnosed in 2009 with Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune disorder affecting the nervous system.

"I'm not saying that's why I wrote the play," St. John explained. "Ideas for plays have danced in my head for years." However, partially paralyzed and confined to her recliner, unable to otherwise participate in theater, St. John completed the first draft of Gertie's Boys.

The play wasn't chosen when she submitted it for consideration in December 2009, but Howie encouraged St. John to keep working on it.

"It's got a lot of heart in it, so I met with her several times to help her make it more theatrical and focus more on the main character," said Howie.

St. John said, "She was most encouraging and very sweet to take time to give me guidance. I submitted it again, and lo and behold it was accepted." Jim Salners, who directed the Tony Award-winning play Art earlier this season at Country Playhouse, was matched with St. John to collaborate with her in working with the actors leading up to the public reading.

Her play looks into the heart of a widow who's still figuring out what she will do with the rest of her life.

Gertie Lawson is asked by a social worker to once more take in a teenager as a foster child. The only difference this time is that Gertie is older, she now lives by herself and the boy, Jamie, has already had a run-in with the law. But if Gertie agrees to invite the sullen 15-year-old into her Galveston home, the judge may relent and not sentence him to jail time for this first offense.

"I'm probably the first Chinese playwright in Houston and there are very few in the whole country," said St. John. That distinction joins a long line of "firsts" for St. John, whose parents taught her "if you can't do it, it's not because you're Chinese."

St. John, 61, grew up in Houston's Denver Harbor neighborhood, the daughter of Chinese and Korean immigrants who ran The Wooden Spoon Restaurant in Katy from 1984 to 1992. St. John spoke a Chinese dialect until age 5, when her father got her a library card and started teaching her to read English.

"To this day, I think in English," she explained.

As a student at Stephen F. Austin High School, where she graduated in 1967, she was especially active in drama, music and the school's "Scottish Brigade" drill team.

At the University of Houston, St. John was the lead singer in several bands. She married her husband in the UH Chapel on August 7, 1971. When the couple moved to the Katy area in 1980, St. John's husband saw an announcement in the newspaper that Country Playhouse was seeking volunteers, and he encouraged her to apply.

St. John had been juggling the job of assistant director on Amadeus at the theater, singing professionally and teaching acting classes at Katy Visual & Performing Arts Center when she was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre. In December 2008, she noticed chills. January came and she didn't feel well. "At the end of February, I could hardly walk," said St. John. "One by one, I dropped out of each activity. I couldn't function."

With treatment, St. John explained, the syndrome usually lasts six months to five years, and a patient achieves 90 percent recovery. "I'm now at 70 percent," said St. John.

Her latest triumph, she laughed, is being able to slurp spaghetti despite the numbness of her upper lip. "I can't whistle, I can't pucker and kiss, I can't smile big."

That might be put to the test if the reading of Gertie's Boys leads to a full-fledged production. Howie said many scripts first read at Country Playhouse have enjoyed further success. For example, Gwen Flager's Waiting to Be Mended debuted in the New Play Reading Series before receiving its first production in 2010 at Theatre Suburbia and Jeffrey Strausser's The Decorator, read last year at Country Playhouse, will be produced this spring in San Antonio, said Howie.