Sedaris and pals bring 'Wigfield' from page to stage


BAY AREA LIVING
By Chad Jones



MAKE one thing quite clear: Wigfield is no Mayberry, RFD.

Although both are small towns, Mayberry is as wholesome as Aunt Bee's homemade grape jelly, while Wigfield is as foul and crusty as a barroom floor after a particularly rowdy night.

American literature is overrun with glimpses into the heart of American small town life -- Grover's Corners in "Our Town," Spoon River in "Spoon River Anthology," Winesburgh, Ohio in the book of the same name. Now add one more town name to the list.

Wigfield is the creation of Amy Sedaris Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert, the same trio of comic actors who birthed the cult Comedy Central sitcom "Strangers with Candy."

You can read about the town of Wigfield in the new book "Wigfield: The Can-do Town That Just May Not" [$22.95, Hyperion]. Or if reading is too tall an order, you can see the authors perform character monologues from the book July 30 and 31 at the Post Street Theatre in San Francisco.

The performances are in lieu of a proper book tour, which the authors say their publisher was too cheap to bankroll.

"We ended up doing the theater show by default," Dinello says by phone from his New York home, where a dog he's babysitting is barking merrily in the background. "Hyperion didn't want to send us on a book tour, so we said, 'What do we do now?' We all have backgrounds in theater, so we decided to do some sort of 'Wigfield' performance."

On stage, as they do in the book, the authors conjure up unpleasant -- but very funny -- images of a town that's barely a town on the brink of destruction. A federally funded dam is about to be torn down, unleashing a torrent of deadly water onto the ramshackle town of Wigfield, which just happens to be built in a dry riverbed.

There are three mayors in Wigfield -- Fleet Hollinger, Charles Halstead and Burchal Sawyer -- to govern about three dozen citizens, most of whom work in the 18 strip clubs and porn emporiums that line the town's single street.

The idea for creating "Wigfield" came after the cancellation of "Strangers with Candy" three years ago. Sedaris and Dinello pitched a children's book idea to 12 people in suits at Hyperion.

"The book was about a worm, an alcoholic worm, who learns to reach for the lowest star possible," Sedaris says from the New York home she shares with a rabbit named Dusty and an imaginary boyfriend named Ricky.

Response from the suits was, as Dinello describes it, "gape-mouthed stares." When asked what other ideas they had, Dinello and Sedaris, who used to be romantically linked, improvised.

"I riffed on an idea that we would create character monologues opposite photographs," Dinello explains. "Then Amy mentioned the name 'Wigfield' and they suddenly loved it."

"I had been making things up about Wigfield since I was a kid," adds Sedaris, younger sister of essayist David Sedaris. "To me, Wigfield was something like a mall that sold wigs and hair and bakery goods."

Needing help to further develop their idea, Sedaris and Dinello contacted Colbert, a friend from their days touring the country with the Second City improv troupe who had moved on to becoming a "senior correspondent" for "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

On "The Daily Show," Colbert had done a story on Jefferson, W.V., a town whose mayor ran on the platform that if elected, he would dissolve the town, which had essentially been a tax front for a bunch of strip joints, porn shops and used auto shops.

Latching onto the idea of a skanky town full of low-lifes and no-lifes about to be flooded quickly called to mind other towns the trio had traveled to in their touring days -- towns such as Rangely, Colo. and Havelock, N.C.

Dinello and Colbert did most of the actual writing in Colbert's New Jersey home.

"Paul and Stephen really chop the wood," Sedaris says. "I'm an idea person. I'm confident with the ideas, then they organize the chaos I come up with. I'm really the hostess of the group. I help get the job, they do the work behind the scenes and I take the credit."

After completing a text of about 25,000 words, Colbert and Dinello re-read their contract, which called for 50,000 words.

"We needed a higher word count," Dinello says. "We panicked."

Inspiration came in the form of designer Todd Oldham, an old friend of Sedaris' who agreed to take photos for the book. Using sets in his studio and locations in Port Jervis, Penn. as backdrops, Oldham transformed Sedaris, Dinello and Colbert into the stripper Raven [Colbert], Wigfield's eldest resident, Mae Ella Padgett [Sedaris] and mean taxidermist Lenare Degroat [Dinello], among others.

During the performance, Oldham's ultra-vivid photographs -- black and white in the book but in gloriously trashy color on stage -- are projected on the wall behind the actors.

"Being in costume and playing with the characters really inspired us," Dinello says. "That really helped the word count."

As they continue their makeshift tour -- Los Angeles comes after San Francisco, and then, who knows? -- the comic trio continues work on a big-screen adaptation of "Strangers with Candy," the TV show about a 46-year-old high school freshman trying to straighten out her life after years of being a "boozer, a loser and a user."

"It's going really slowly," Sedaris says. "But don't put that in the article because it'll make the producers nervous. Say you've read the screenplay and that it's really good but it needs more action verbs."