No grim fairy tale

The veteran actress Mary Martello, who has made her living on many a Philadelphia stage, was trapped on one. Good thing, too. It gave her some time to think.

This was four years ago, on the Walnut Street Theatre main stage, where Martello was Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. Mrs. Potts, essentially a teapot with a mouth and singing ability, had an enormous costume, which meant Martello couldn't leave the backstage area because she couldn't fit through the door. She sat on a stool and listened nightly as Christina DeCicco, playing Belle, sang a song that began "There's been a change in me."

That's when Martello began thinking. Age 50 had come. And menopause was on the way. Where do all the princesses go when Social Security checks start arriving? What does "there's been a change in me" mean then?

Her answers to those questions are delivered in the first play Martello, now 57, has ever written, Happily Ever After, in previews at the Adrienne Theatre in Center City, and opening tomorrow night.

"I thought, wouldn't it be funny to be one of those princessy people - but from the point of view of those same people 40 years later?"

So the show's poster has Martello looking anything but demure in pearls, with a tiara sliding off her blond wig, a cutesy cartoon bird on her shoulder and a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

The show is presented by 1812 Productions, the city's company devoted to comedy, and directed by Jennifer Childs, its leader. It was Childs who got Martello to find time in a steady acting career to write the script.

Says Childs, "That piece had been living in her for a while. The idea that 'happily ever after' doesn't exist has been done in movies and on television in a sort of snide and cynical way. But Mary was looking at taking it a step further, to places where 'happily ever after' does exist."

Martello, whose theater career has spanned more than half a century, plays six roles and sings (one song is by the third of her four children, musician Benjamin, 33).

A one-woman show for her is nothing new; she's done two cabarets. But a one-woman, full production by her is different: Writing "has been like being a kid again," she says, even though the writing involves the unchildlike subject of menopause - which for Martello, turned out to be liberating. "You are not held captive by the pull of hormones," she says. "You're free. So don't be afraid to have some humor about it."

An energetic woman with an all-encompassing smile, Martello realized that "happily ever after" was actually happening for her on an icy winter day a few years ago. She was rushing the eight blocks from a day-long rehearsal at the Walnut to an evening performance at the Prince Music Theater, cursing herself for not taking a cab, feeling "grouchy and guilty and resentful and sorry for myself."

Then, suddenly, "I realized that I was living my dream come true. This was it! I was an actress going from one theater to another to work. I was raising my last child and had created a home and family. The very things I had dreamt about spending my life doing, I was actually doing."

The realization made her laugh out loud. "I just accepted that the reality of 'happily ever after' existed right here in the midst of the mundane details of my daily life."

The broader details of her life are hardly mundane. Martello, like many early-'50s kids, was a child of television - in a different way: She grew up on it. As a 7-year-old in Lansing, Mich., she got her mom to take her to auditions and scored her first big gig on an Oldsmobile Christmas special, as a little drummer girl in a duet with Florence Henderson. She was mystified when the show's host, the not-yet-famous Johnny Carson, told her to break a leg - showbiz for "good luck," but still Greek to her.

As a young teenager, Martello was on afternoon TV's local kids' show Culver's Clubhouse, and took private voice instruction with a husband/wife team who got her other bookings. She switched from Catholic to public school, where in high school she found her TV reputation hard to handle. She ended up pregnant, in a home for unwed mothers, then raising her son James (now 42, married with two children).

A quick study, she finished high school in an accelerated program, then married and had a second child, Leigh (now 40, a Pennsylvania Hospital labor and delivery nurse, married with a son). Martello was a voice major at Lansing Community College, then switched to acting and worked steadily at a local theater.

Divorced and remarried, she moved to Richmond, Va. - and culture shock. "But I ended up getting involved in theater, and theater people are the same all over the world," Martello says.

After Benjamin was born, she moved with her husband to his new job in Princeton, where she earned an Actors' Equity professional union card at the McCarter Theatre. In 1987, with two children in college and one at home, she was sent by a New York agent to an audition in Philadelphia. She immediately began getting work, and discovered her knack for comedy.

In Philly, Martello says, she found an excitement she'd not experienced in years. "The commitment here is amazing - people committed to creating theater and people excited about seeing it." She has reflected on this discovery several times at the microphone during ceremonies for the local Barrymore theater awards - of which she owns four.

Between musical and dramatic roles at 10 theaters here (and once, a performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra), Martello married husband number three, Todd Lewis; their son, Brennan, 17, is in high school.

Like many Philadelphia actors, Martello - who jokes that she is "disgustingly optimistic" and has never waited tables to support her career - has exceptional range. After squeezing the comic extreme from a character as if it were a plump citrus, she may, in her next show, play the intense mother of a murdered daughter (InterAct Theatre Company's Frozen), or Gertrude in Lantern Theater's Hamlet.

"She's a heady actress, very smart, and keen to do a rigorous interpretive analysis," says Lantern's chief, Charles McMahon, her Hamlet director. "She could advance the interpretation of a piece during the course of a day, and come in the next day with a whole new set of ideas that advance that work."

Martello says that in her own "happily ever after," she's in a different relationship with the world. "As a grandma, you're not the go-to guy anymore. You're on the outside, observing. Emotionally, it's a big shift." For now, she's happy to trace the big shifts in aging through her current show. For Martello, being trapped on stage has had its creative benefits. We should all be so trapped.