Photo By Carol Rosegg

Loveland native Ann Randolph presents Squeeze Box, her painfully funny one-woman comedy about self-discovery and self-acceptance, at the Cincinnati Playhouse.

The road from Loveland to the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park might seem pretty direct for most of us (downright high-speed, in fact, if you follow I-71), but Ann Randolph has taken a more circuitous route. Nevertheless, she's found her way there for a full-fledged production of her one-woman show, Squeeze Box, which opens in the Shelterhouse Theater on Thursday.

The path from suburban Cincinnati to a stage in Mount Adams has been an intriguing one, full of stories -- and that's what Randolph's career has been all about. Since growing up here, Randolph has been taking side trips that yield material she's converted into fascinating characters and performances. After graduating from Loveland High School, she headed to Athens, Ohio, thinking she'd major in theater at Ohio University. But that didn't quite happen.

"I just wanted to be out exploring and creating," she explained in an interview for the Web site ActorsLife.com. She took a position as a resident volunteer at a state mental hospital. "I lived with the mental patients and earned free room and board in exchange for writing and staging plays with the mentally ill."

She also wrote monologues based on her experience that were discouraged by her theater professors, so she switched majors to "one of those you can design yourself -- I think it was something like trees and shrubs, music and sociology." After graduation, Randolph went even further afield. She'd read that good money could be made cleaning fish in Alaska, so she headed there and got a job at a cannery.

"I sucked at the cannery job," she recalls. "The first day on the job they put me on the slime line to pick the blood balls off the salmon. I was wearing these high-heeled pink fashion boots, and the freezing water got down into the boots and I got hypothermia. I passed out on the cannery floor."

But she was undaunted. She worked subsequently on the clean-up project after the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Alaska coast ("I stood in crude oil up to my knees and cleaned oily rocks with cheerleader pom-poms from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week for three months"). Later she was the only woman serving on the crew on a research vessel cruise at sea for nine months.

Given her subsequent life, these experiences seem to have been exactly the right foundation. Her original aspirations were to be part of Saturday Night Live. She spent time in a comedy skit company in Los Angeles called the Groundlings, working with performers like Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan.

After more odd jobs around America, Randolph found herself back in Los Angeles, where she spent a decade working at a homeless shelter for mentally ill women. She took the job because it was at night; her days were free to write. Working there she got the initial idea for Squeeze Box, which has found its way to become the final production of the Cincinnati Playhouse's 2005-06 season.

The play features Randolph playing all the characters, male and female, young and old. The catalyst for the story is a crisis of faith by a narrator (closely based on Randolph's own life) who is full of questions about whether her life is progressing as she had imagined. The 75-minute show contains painfully funny portraits of shelter residents, including Brandy, a schizophrenic crack-whore, and Irene, who sang a very inappropriate song at her minister husband's church. Squeeze Box also features a love story about a relationship that evolves from a personal ad on Match.com.

Randolph presented Squeeze Box to big audiences during a one-night performance at the Playhouse's 2002 "alteractive" series. She mounted it subsequently "whenever I could raise $500 to rent a performing space," she told me in a recent interview.

During a run in Los Angeles, husband and wife Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft were in the audience, encouraged by Brooks' daughter-in-law, who had been in a writing group with Randolph. They loved the material and wanted to make it into a movie. They worked with Randolph to whittle the piece down from two-and-a-half hours, and Bancroft produced it at the off-Broadway Acorn Theatre in July 2004. Randolph has continued to present the show everywhere from a one-night performance a year ago at Dayton's Human Race Theatre Company to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2005.

And now she's bringing it back to Cincinnati for a month-long run at the Playhouse. The production is directed by Alan Bailey, who's staged several shows in Cincinnati, including Smoke on the Mountain and Sanders Family Christmas: More Smoke on the Mountain, both of which he conceived and directed.

Bailey was working at the Playhouse when Randolph performed there in 2002. They met and things really clicked.

"He was so encouraging and allowed me to experiment," Randolph says. "I think you know you have good directors when they inspire you to create. He was also with me from the first 10 minutes of the material and helped me shape the show."

Randolph says she's drawn to people whose lives are outside the mainstream. "I just had these characters in me, and I had such a strong desire to share their story. They are characters living on the edge or the margins of society, and their stories are not often heard. I could say the same for myself."

And for the next for weeks, she will.