“The Cover of Life,” by R. T. Robinson opens on the Wimberley Players stage April 29 and runs through May 22. Tood, Weetsie and Sybil are all brides in rural Louisiana in 1943. Each is married to a Cliffert brother. The men are off to war, and a local news story about these young wives keeping the home fires burning intrigues Life Magazine editor Henry Luce. He decides that they belong on the cover and assigns reporter Kate Miller to the story. She has been covering the war in Europe. Though she views doing a “women’s piece” as a career set-back, she accepts the assignment because it will be her first cover story. Kate spends a week with the Cliffert women. Her haughty urban attitude gives way to sympathy as she begins to understand them while coming face-to-face with her own powerlessness in a man’s world. Filled with charm and fun, “The Cover Of Life” is a deeply affecting story about the struggle for self-worth.
Playing Tood is newcomer to the Players stage, Lettie Dyer. Austin Strobel, also new to the Players, is playing Sybil. In the role of Weetsie is Meret Slover. Karen Rudy is playing the brides’ mother-in-law Aunt Ola. Reporter Kate Miller is played by Roxanne Strobel. In the role of the local reporter Addie May is Celeste Coburn, a WP regular.
“The Cover of Life” premiered off-Broadway at The American Place Theatre in 1994. The play is based on the life of the real Tood, Ollie Marzelle Fife, who was the playwrights’ mother. In a 1993 interview for the Hartford Courant, Robinson said, “The secret of great Southern writers is being born into a family of interesting, passionate women.” Robinson, who grew up in Bastrop, La., not far from the town the play is set in, said, “In my own mind, I just went and sort of sat in the living room with these women back in 1943 and listened to them talk.”
