Diminutive actress Dixie Lee Sedgwick performed her one-woman show, Bonnie Parker, on May 1, 2002 at the Trinity River Arts Center in its next-to-last workshop production before opening May 21 for a two-week run at Blue Heron Arts Center in New York. Sedgwick, who also wrote the show, has been refining it since spring 1999 at numerous Dallas area venues. She has done extensive research on the distaff half of the outlaw duo Bonnie and Clyde (presented on celluloid in 1967 with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty).
Sedgwick attempts to humanize Bonnie and presents her as the unloved and neglected little girl of an unwed teenage barmaid. Sedgwick takes the audience on Bonnie's journey with her first love, the philandering Roy Thornton, whom she married, and later living on the lam with her lover and rescuer, outlaw Clyde Barrow. Bonnie is depicted as a talented dancer who performed warm-up routines for stumping politicians. She also wrote passable introspective poetry. Sedgwick recites several of Bonnie's poems.
We follow Bonnie through her peregrinations with Thornton and Barrow until her death at the age of 23 in Irving, Texas (a Dallas suburb) in January 1934, where she was killed in a shoot-out with Texas Rangers.
Sedgwick does a credible job humanizing Parker as the sweet "little blue-eyed girl" (the show's original title), who was done in by her love and devotion to the wrong sort of men — all of which begs the question -- who cares? Sedgwick might have fared better if she had channeled her talents and energies into a character that merited the audience's sympathies. Bonnie Parker was just another unfortunate little girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who, as an adult, controlled her own destiny and made all the wrong choices -- a footnote in the history books -- and not worth one's pondering her fate.
Still, Sedgwick mirrors the character she depicts: expressive performing talent, insightful writing, and poor choice of material.
