by dan pine
staff writer
As a kid living in Santa Rosa, Stephanie St. James remembers the 1985 film version of “The Color Purple,” and being especially riveted by one cast member.
“I liked the character Squeak,” she recalls, “because Rae Dawn Chong was someone I could really relate to: someone of mixed race, curly hair like mine. Seeing her on screen, I always had her stamped in my mind.”
How’s this for full circle? Twenty-two years later, St. James plays Squeak in the touring company of “The Color Purple,” now running through December at S.F.’s Orpheum Theatre.
Based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, “The Color Purple” tells the story of a poor African American community in rural 1920s Georgia. Oprah Winfrey, who co-starred in the Steven Spielberg version (and earned an Oscar nod for her labors), produced the musical, which became a Broadway hit two years ago.
St. James plays her part –– a sassy “kept woman” hanging out at the juke joint –– to the hilt. She also fits in well with her all-black cast mates. But most audience members would never guess St. James is the Hebrew-speaking daughter of a Jewish Israeli woman and the granddaughter of a Polish-born Holocaust survivor.
Adding to the ethnic melange, her father is a Guyanese-born black man who attended Israel’s Yeshiva University, where he met his future wife. The couple later moved to Miami, where Stephanie was born, then settled in Santa Rosa.
Hebrew was St. James’s first language. But not for long.
“As I got older they stopped speaking it to us,” she says. “They needed a language to speak that we wouldn’t understand. But I’ve been back to Israel, and I still understand it a little.”
St. James credits her grandmother with having, perhaps, the greatest impact on her. Born in Poland, her grandmother was herded into the Vilna Ghetto. Though she later escaped to the forest, her entire family was murdered. Rescued by a Jewish partisan, she lived in Leningrad for a few years before immigrating to Israel.
“She has been my ultimate hero and mentor,” says St. James of her bubbe, who died earlier this year. “I looked up to her my entire life. She survived the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War and the intifada. She spoke six languages. She was an amazing woman.”
Meanwhile, her father would sing her to sleep with calypso lullabies and Beatles songs. At age 6, St. James snagged a role in a Contra Costa County production of “Annie” and later studied at the San Francisco Ballet and the Marin Ballet. By the time she graduated from Santa Rosa High, she had settled on a career in entertainment.
St. James co-starred in Broadway and touring productions of “Fame,” “Damn Yankees” and “Footloose.” She also launched a dual career as a singer-songwriter with her own band, the St. James Experience.
But all of that was almost overshadowed by her battle with endometriosis, a debilitating gynecological condition that can cause extreme pain, bleeding and other symptoms. St. James has endured two surgeries and frequent battles with pain.
“It’s not a terminal illness, but it can kill your spirit,” St. James says. “There were times I felt like giving up. That’s when I tried to emulate my grandmother’s spirit. You have to choose life or choose death. Which do you want more? I chose life.”
And that meant getting back to work. She won a national casting call for “The Color Purple,” which opened in Chicago earlier this year. After San Francisco, she and the show move on to a run in Los Angeles.
She says of Squeak: “She’s one of those characters you see for brief moments, but you never forget her because there’s always something fun going on.”
And though St. James fully inhabits her Southern black character on stage, off stage she’s still a nice Jewish girl.
“My Jewish heritage is such a strong and big part of who I am,” she says. “When I went to my grandmother’s grave, people said, ‘Do you bring flowers?’ I said, ‘No, we bring rocks.’ To be able to say I had a grandmother who was a Holocaust survivor and two parents of an interracial marriage, well, there are not a lot of people like me.”
“The Color Purple” plays 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, with 2 p.m. matinees Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, through Dec. 9, at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., S.F. Tickets: $50-$99. Info: www.colorpurple.com or (415) 551-2020.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California