Huston worked all over the world in many capacities, including as Peace Corps regional director for North Africa, the Near East, Asia and Pacific; and later as director for Peace Corps programs in Mali and Bulgaria. She was pioneering not only in her work, which included authoring four books, but in the choices she made and actions she took around her illness and death.
"Perdita" explores the life of Perdita Huston - Peace Corps Staffer and Activist
Stonington stages `Perdita,' homage to Maine woman
Sep 11, 2005 - Portland Press Herald
Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House presents "Perdita," a one-man, multi-character show written and performed by Pierre-Marc Diennet, at 7 p.m. Sept. 22-23.
"Perdita" explores the life of pioneering Maine woman Perdita Huston of Lewiston and Portland, through the eyes of her son, Diennet.
Huston left Maine to study in France, beginning an international career that spanned four decades until her swift death from ovarian cancer in 2001. Her coming of age in Maine during the 1950s forged her into an early feminist and activist whose passion was the realization and defense of basic human rights for women of the global south.
Diennet's script weaves his recollections of his mother, her two husbands, and her lovers together with his own movement toward understanding and appreciation for this complicated woman.
Huston worked all over the world in many capacities, including as Peace Corps regional director for North Africa, the Near East, Asia and Pacific; and later as director for Peace Corps programs in Mali and Bulgaria. She was pioneering not only in her work, which included authoring four books, but in the choices she made and actions she took around her illness and death.
Diennet spent his young life following Huston as she traveled around the world promoting suffrage and civil rights. He had trekked through India, Pakistan, Algeria, Haiti, Switzerland, England and the United States before he was 16, always staying in a different house, never going to the same school.
Diennet portrays 14 characters in the play, which is told through the eyes of a son whose resentment at his fatherless and rootless childhood gradually grows into respect, as he reviews his mother's life and watches her die.
Diennet lives in New York City. He became interested in theater when he moved with his mother to London in the late 1980s. He has an undergraduate degree in theater from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, as well as graduate training in acting from the National Theater Conservatory.
He performs regularly in regional theaters around the country, including the Public Theater in Lewiston, and he appeared as the Moose Boy in Opera House Arts' 2004 production of "The Ferry Musicals" at the Stonington Opera House.
"Perdita" was first presented as a work-in-progress in April by Opera House Arts, first at the Stonington Opera House and then at the dedication of Perdita Huston's papers and books at the Maine Women Writer's Collection at the University of New England in Portland.
Tickets cost $8 and are available at the Opera House box office or by calling 367-2788.
