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Camille G. Van Wagoner was thinking about retiring. Maybe it was time.
She had racked up an impressive résumé of comedic and musical-theater roles on a variety of Utah stages, but approaching the milestone of her 50th birthday, she was tired of facing the lack of opportunities for female actors of a certain age.
That was before Van Wagoner fell in love with self-made superagent Sue Mengers, who represented Hollywood's most prominent actors and directors in the late 1960s and 1970s.
"She changed me," says Van Wagoner of the strong, self-made woman she's playing in Salt Lake Acting Company's season-opening show, "I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers." "I've become very close to Sue Mengers. There's a bit of me in her, and there's a bit of her in me."
John Logan's dishy one-woman play, set in the glamorous Beverly Hills living room where the agent held her A-list-only parties, was brought to life last season on Broadway by Bette Midler. The Divine Miss M called the show "an aria with slow-moving parts, and parts with laughs and tears."
The New York Times' Charles Isherwood called the show "a delectable soufflé of a solo show" that offers theatergoers the chance to feel like "twinklies" for a night, which is what Mengers, who died in 2011, called Hollywood stars. "Mengers' love of celebrity was perhaps equaled only by her affection for marijuana," the critic noted.
Van Wagoner says she found fresh inspiration as a performer from the story of Mengers, who as a young girl emigrated from Germany with her parents, teaching herself English from watching movies. "You want to be a thing, you make yourself that thing," Mengers says in the play, and Van Wagoner adds: "And she did."
"She's such a delightful character to play," the actor says. "She swears like a sailor, she smokes like a smokestack and she constantly has a joint in her hand. And she's not afraid."
"I'll Eat You Last" offers an intriguing look inside pre-TMZ show business, says Cynthia Fleming, SLAC's executive producer, who describes Mengers as the "Joan Rivers of agents." "You love her when you watch the play, even though she was very ruthless. She just worked whatever she needed to work to get her actors hired."
Director Robin Wilks-Dunn was intrigued to learn about Mengers, whom she hadn't heard of, although she knew the work of all of the insiders Mengers gossips about. "What attracted me to the play is the fact that she wasn't just the most powerful female agent in Hollywood in the late 1960s and 1970s, she was the most powerful agent," Wilks-Dunn says. "We were doing so much Googling the first week of rehearsals" to find out the truth of the stories Mengers tells.
The show's universal themes should appeal to anyone influenced by the entrepreneurial spirit of the West. "She saw something, and if she wanted it, she made it happen," Wilks-Dunn says. "And that certainly appeals to the pioneer spirit of Utah. We live in a desert, and we found a way to make it blossom, to make it bloom."
The director praises the work of Van Wagoner, whom she lauds as a great local talent. "She's wonderfully imaginative and inventive, and her comic timing is perfect," Wilks-Dunn says.
Opening the season with a one-woman show is something of a departure for the theater company, which is just concluding its extended run of the big-energy, big-cast satirical musical "Saturday's Voyeur." "Voyeur" ends Sunday, Sept. 14, just three days before "I'll Eat You Last" opens in the company's Chapel Theatre.
SLAC is celebrating its 44th season after hitting a record-setting 2,800 season subscriptions. Fleming says the theater company is also celebrating a new, more tightly focused mission statement: "To engage and enrich community through brave, contemporary theater."
The mission will inspire the company to continue forging partnerships with nonprofits and schools, as it already does with its annual children's show.
In addition, SLAC plans to launch a playwrighting workshop with David Kranes, the retired University of Utah professor who helped found the Sundance Playwriting Laboratory. The company will continue its 20-year-old New Play Sounding Series of readings, will hire 11 students as part of its University Professional Theatre Program and will continue to host visual arts exhibits to coincide with each play.
All of the company's community programs are detailed in this year's brochure, which usually just focuses on the season's plays. "We wanted to let people know what Salt Lake Acting Company is as a whole," Fleming says.
Like a theater company dedicated to the idea of enriching community, Van Wagoner appreciates the way Mengers nurtured her "twinklies." The superagent understood the performers' fragile egos and knew how to reveal just enough truth, but not the whole truth, to them. "The skin of dreams is so thin. You poke one little hole and all the air hisses out," Mengers says.
And then there's this line, one of the actor's favorites in the play: "With me, you get all the crayons in the box, even the ugly ones, even the angry ones. But never boring. Trust me, you'll miss me when I'm gone."
Says the actor, with a laugh: "Every time I say that, I'm saying that to my husband."
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'I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers'
Salt Lake Acting Company opens its season with John Logan's one-woman show, featuring Camille G. Van Wagoner, directed by Robin Wilks-Dunn. Logan is the Tony Award-winning playwright of "Red," which the company produced in 2012.
When • Previews Wednesday, Sept. 17, and Thursday, Sept. 18; opens Friday, Sept. 19; continues through Sunday, Oct. 26; shows at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday; 1 and 6 p.m. Sundays.
Also • Additional performances on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, Oct. 25, 2 p.m.
Where • Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W. 500 North, Salt Lake City
Tickets • $15-$42; discounts for groups, students, seniors, and age 30 and younger; at 801-363-7522 or saltlakeactingcompany.org
Other season shows
Oct. 22-Nov. 16 • Gina Gionfriddo's "Rapture, Blister, Burn," directed by Adrianne Moore. A comedy about gender politics based on the divergent career paths of two female friends from graduate school.
Dec. 5-27 • The sixth annual children's show will be "A Year With Frog and Toad," an adaptation of Arnold Lobel's books, directed by Penny Caywood. "Part vaudeville, part make-believe, all charm," producers say.
Feb. 4-March 1 • "Two Stories" by Utah-based playwright Elaine Jarvik, directed by Keven Myhre, about a journalist struggling to keep her job in a digital era, who finds a great story when a Pakistani family moves into the neighborhood.
April 8-May 5 • William Missouri Downs' "Mr. Perfect," a sort-of romantic comedy about a flight attendant who thinks she has met the perfect guy, by the author of "The Exit Interview," directed by John Caywood.
June 24-Aug. 30 • The 2015 edition of the annual satirical musical "Saturday's Voyeur," by Allen Nevins and Nancy Borgenicht.