Bernadette Chapman and her husband, Gary, had lived in Birmingham for about five years when, in 1996, their daughter, Sadie, was born with a severe heart defect.
“Luckily, we were at UAB with the awesome pediatric cardiology department,” she says.
Sadie had her first open-heart surgery at 9 months old, followed by other surgeries throughout her life. But she also took ballet and violin, and fell in love with acting, which she went to study at the Lee Strasberg Film and Theatre Institute in New York.
Eventually, though, Sadie would return to Birmingham, where she was put on a list for a heart transplant in 2015.
Eight years after her transplant, Sadie died of a heart attack at age 26, but it’s the three-month stay at UAB during the transplant process that inspired Bernadette Chapman to write the play “Waiting on Word,” which has its world premiere at Birmingham Festival Theatre Friday through Aug. 4.
“It’s very loosely based on a true story, how I would meet people in the hospital,” says Chapman, a screenwriter and filmmaker who had never written a play before. “Just meeting people from all different backgrounds, and all of us having the same drive of taking care of our children, no matter who we are, where we’re from, and how you can lean on strangers for months at a time or for just one night. That’s the inspiration for my story.”
The characters in the waiting room in Chapman’s play include a woman who’s waiting for her daughter to get her heart; a family whose son, a high-school quarterback, is shot after a football game; and a family in the hospital after their daughter has overdosed on heroin for the third time.
That last family is also loosely based on fact, the story of Charla Cochran, Sadie’s first acting and ballet teacher, and Chris Cochran, whose daughter, Cassidy, died of an overdose.
“Charla and I have been friends forever,” Chapman says. “She’s been in a couple of my movies, and we were involved in Theatre Downtown together. I asked her if I could use their story as the inspiration for one of the other families in the waiting room, and she said, of course, yes.” Though Charla Cochran now lives in Utah, she helped Chapman throughout the process of writing the play.
The names have been changed for the characters that sprung out of real life, and some facts have been changed, too, Chapman says.
“There has to be some space between the characters in my life and my friends’ lives and things like that to give us a little bit of breathing room,” she says.
Writing the play was “cathartic” for Chapman, who lives in Good Hope with her husband, Gary, who recently retired from UAB.
“Gary’s a painter, so he had his paintings that were his response to living three months in the hospital and having Sadie get a transplant and everything,” she says. “This was kind of my outlet.”
Chapman has high praise for Rhonda Erbrick, who is directing the play, and the cast, which includes Michelle R.H. Edstrom, Suzy Conerly, Chailse Paige, Lukata Agyei Mjumbe, Freddy Rubio, Romeo Garrison, Julie Meadows, Paul Boyer, Abigail Cheek and Paul Skripnik.
“Rhonda was also friends with Sadie, and she’s doing an amazing job,” Chapman says. “There are a lot of people involved who are intimate with the story and the players, so it’s making it very interesting watching them find their characters and find their voices for these people.”
Chapman, who has just finished writing the pilot of a TV miniseries she hopes to sell, plans to keep writing. She also hopes “Waiting On Word” will have a life after its premiere at BFT.
Its message?
“That no matter who we are or where we come from, it is so important how we all pull together to help each other out at those difficult times,” she says.
“Waiting on Word,” at Birmingham Festival Theatre July 26-Aug. 4.
