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She is a shining example of hurdles overcome. Like pressure-packed diamonds, rated for their four C’s — cut, color, clarity and carat — “Brownsville Bred” is certainly ring-worthy.

While few would call the circumstances of Elaine Del Valle’s childhood “right,” watching her autobiographical one-woman show, “Brownsville Bred” — on stage at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls through Oct. 17 — it is clear that she is a shining example of hurdles overcome. Like pressure-packed diamonds, rated for their four C’s — cut, color, clarity and carat — “Brownsville Bred” is certainly ring-worthy, particulary in the first-class setting of the Schoolhouse.

In terms of cut, Del Valle’s multi-faceted performance mixes anger, innocence, pain and wonder as she navigates corrugated, graffitied, chain-linked Brownsville, Brooklyn in the 1980s. She learns early that growing up in Brownsville means crossing the street every half block to make sure you’re not being followed. It means waving to an imaginary friend across the street to ward off those who prey on the all-alone. It means going out of your way to avoid the methodone clinic. Del Valle’s writing is natural, her imagery powerful, her life’s journey hopeful and harrowing.

As for color, Del Valle jokes she’s one of just 17 Puerto Ricans in her neighborhood. While she’s proud, she knows she doesn’t fit in. “We live in Brownsville,” she says. “I want to be black.” She bristles when her father plays his salsa records, but beams when she hears him sing along. Asked to sing a song at a high-school audition, the only one that leaps to Del Valle’s mind is “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” “the black national anthem.”

Del Valle’s observations have compelling clarity. Those beautiful brown eyes took it all in. She saw how crack gripped her neighborhood, creating “crackheads, crack families, crack apartments, and crack stores.” She describe crack-vial sizes in terms she understands: as big as a .22 shell, or a .38 shell, or an Uzi shell. Still, there were simpler childhood moments: watching “Mork & Mindy,” listening to records, dealing with the pain of puppy love. “Wham! got it right, yo,” she says. “When you’re in heartbreak, guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm.” Amid the laughter — and there is plenty of laughter — Del Valle also had moments no child should have to endure, moments of 40-carat gravity that leave a lump in the throat and bring a tear to the eye.
As an actress, her emotions are raw and ready.

There is love and loss, hope and disappointment. But through it all, Del Valle’s squeaky voice rarely loses its lilt. She’s positively charming. When she was a kid growing up in the projects, Del Valle would descend the 14 steps between floors by walking down the first two and leaping the rest of the way down, counting “Step, step, twelve!” “Step, step, twelve!” as she went.

In “Brownsville Bred,” she manages to take that leap into the heart, to make her particular story universal and relatable.
Jason Bolen’s set is impeccably rendered, lit expertly by David Pentz, who gets kudos — along with sound designer Matt Stine — for a great overhead-train effect during one of the evening’s tensest moments.

Schoolhouse artistic director Pamela Moller Kareman saw an earlier incarnation of the show and worked with Del Valle to expand it and bring it to Croton Falls. Credit Kareman for polishing the gem and for bravely bringing it north. It’s thought-provoking, moving theater that deserves to be seen. Del Valle fills the Schoolhouse stage with so many memorable characters, you expect them all to show up at the curtain call.

But Del Valle stands alone.

Cut, color, clarity and carat aren’t enough C’s to describe this diamond: Add captivating, compelling and charming to the list.

Ms. Del Valle tells her coming-of-age story in “Brownsville Bred,” a one-woman show now playing at theSchoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls. And for the most part, it’s a frightening tale.

There was the time that Ms. Del Valle was sent to return her sister’s library book and fought off would-be rapists. There were the drug addicts all around her (“They’d run around naked”), like the neighbor nicknamed Crackhead Wanda. There was the death from AIDS of someone very close to her. And there was, above all, the overwhelming day-to-day reality of living in such a densely populated area.

“In one building, to have 3,000 people” was a formative experience, she said in a telephone interview from her home in Roslyn Harbor, on Long Island. (She and her husband also have an apartment on Central Park West.) “When you were outside of the block, you didn’t really recognize anyone,” she recalled. “Within your own building, you recognized the faces. Everything else was weird and dangerous.”

When Ms. Del Valle got out of Brownsville — thanks to her admission to Brooklyn Technical High School, as “Brownsville Bred” relates — it wasn’t just the drugs, crime and poverty that she escaped. More important, she said, was that she escaped the low expectations that almost defeated her.

“When you’re in that situation, you start to believe the naysayers,” she said. “You put the bar exactly where they set it.” But that sort of thing, she added, doesn’t happen only in poor areas.

“It can happen anywhere in the world, where you’re constantly put into a box,” she said. “It can be in the richest area, where people are labeling you.”

“Brownsville Bred” has its happy moments, too. Like the summer she spent in Puerto Rico with her father’s family. “For them I was wealthy,” she recalled during the interview. “I was from somewhere exotic and strange. I was just shown so much love every single day.”

In the show, Ms. Del Valle talks about her mother telephoning almost everyone she knew on the day her daughter began menstruating, an event that she compares to a bar or bat mitzvah celebration. (“Today I am a señorita.”)

Ms. Del Valle has attributed her success — the show has received positive reviews in Los Angeles and New York — to Wynn Handman, the director and acting teacher who helped her develop it for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in downtown Manhattan two years ago. She also praises both her parents and thanks Pamela Moller Kareman, the Schoolhouse Theater’s artistic director, who is directing this production. But in the end, a big part of Ms. Del Valle’s message is that each person is in charge of making his or her dreams a reality.

“It’s not who’s going to let you” achieve success, she said. “It’s who’s going to stop you. Just let it happen.”

Del Valle’s account of her life experiences is not only theatrically riveting, it tells the story of a woman who is able to emerge from disappointment and trauma with her humanity not only intact, but triumphant, to boot.

This must be the year of memorable one-person shows. Tina Fabrique is wowing them in “Ella the Musical” at Long Wharf in New Haven, Miche Braden will be reprising her bravura performance in “The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith,” while Elizabeth Aspenlieder starred in a revival of “Bad Dates” at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.

Elaine Del Valle — a Latina actress with a smile that can brighten up a theater — provides a poignant autobiographical monologue about life in the barrio. Her show is called “Brownsville Bred,” and it’s the opening production of the 2010 season at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, N.Y.

The story is set in “the projects,” a section of east Brooklyn in which the actress was raised. Her monologue is a taut emotional journey through a half-life that will have you on the edge of your seat.

Unlike other celebratory monologues, this show takes poetic allusions to “the unconquerable soul” out of literary moth balls and into real life. Del Valle’s account of her life experiences is not only theatrically riveting, it tells the story of a woman who is able to emerge from disappointment and trauma with her humanity not only intact, but triumphant, to boot.

But make no mistake about it. Del Valle’s commanding performance is not only a product of what she has to say about her life. It is just as much an outcome of an impressive set of acting skills in delivering the theatrical goods. Those techniques, ripened in such training venues as Wynn Handman’s acting studio, have equipped the actress to portray her coming of age narrative compellingly.

Director Pamela Moller Kareman, in collaboration with the actress, makes the most of the staging. Whether collapsing on stage after having to assist as a “birthing coach” for her mother, going into paroxysms of delight after being accepted into specialty schools in New York City like The High School of Performing Arts, taking a shine to the fullback captain of her high school, Skippy Gonzales, surviving the trauma of attempted rape and a gang initiation at Madison Square Garden, or news of her father contracting AIDS in Puerto Rico, the actress has the audience in the palm of her hand.

Whether squatting comfortably on the plastic-covered couch in the living room of her tenement apartment, careening across the stage, or doing the “rhumba,” a Latino version of mambo-like dance movement with only a distant relationship to how the preppies used to cut a rug at Roseland, Del Valle’s physical aptitude is apparent everywhere.

She is also forgiving. She subsequently marries a man from the Bronx and remarks generously that, “I don’t hold that against him.”

The play’s setting is 301 Sutter Ave., a section of the city where the average household is more than six persons. Jason Bolen‘s set is dotted with graffiti, while David Pentz‘s lighting design highlights the action. Matt Stine‘s sound design pipes in noises of the barrio, and on a positive note, the optimistic Debbie Boone ditty, “You Light Up My Life.,” could as well be a tribute to the actress herself.

With fashion-model beauty and a smile that can melt iron

“Written, performed and lived” by Elaine Del Valle. With fashion-model beauty and a smile that can melt iron, Puerto Rican Del Valle tells a mostly affectionate tale of living in and breaking out of the Brooklyn housing projects where she grew up. She mocks her own smile when, in trouble, she grins maniacally. She tells a generic saga of triumph over impediments of family trauma, drug addition, illness and would-be rapists, with her infectious charm that washes away the shortcomings of the script. She has a squeaky voice that can also become tinged with a growl, hinting at the ferocity mingled with the sweetness of her portrayal. We’re made up of mostly water, she says, and the liquid looks so clean. Like us, however, it’s not necessarily as it appears.

“Biography,” perhaps the finest boulevard comedy ever written by an American, has long been in need of a revival on Broadway. S.N. Behrman, one of the most successful playwrights of the ’30s and ’40s, never had another hit after “A Streetcar Named Desire” wrapped up its original New York run. His old-fashioned brand of high comedy was washed off the stage by Williams’s poetic naturalism. Yet Behrman’s early plays have lost none of their effectiveness, and “Biography,” perhaps the finest boulevard comedy ever written by an American, has long been in need of a revival on Broadway, where it hasn’t been seen since 1934. Some smart producer would thus do well to pay a visit to the Mint Theatre, the Off-Broadway house where Tracy Shayne is giving the performance of a lifetime as Marion Froude, a portrait painter with a past who decides to tell all—on paper.

Ms. Shayne, who used to be a familiar face around town in such long-running musicals as “Chicago” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” has retrofitted herself as a stage comedienne in “Biography,” with results that are bewitching to behold. Her charm is contagious, her vivacity electrifying. You won’t have any trouble seeing why the play’s male characters are drawn to her like flies to an open jar of raspberry jam. The Pearl Theatre Company put on a crisp staging of “Biography” two seasons ago, but this one, directed by Pamela Moller Kareman and originally seen last season at Croton Falls’ Schoolhouse Theater, is even more delightful, in large part because of Ms. Shayne. Where’s she been lately? Beats me, but I sure am glad she’s back.

Mare Nostrum Elements & Theater 808′s tasteful production of S.N. Behrman‘s unjustly neglected 1932 Biography has replicated the Mint’s talent for unearthing forgotten treasures and giving them meticulous stagings.

Surprisingly feminist for a male-penned work of the era, Biography (directed by Pamela Moler Kareman) concerns Marion Froude (Tracy Shayne), an effervescent portrait artist known for her paintings and many lovers. Seemingly flaky but perceptive and modest—”obscure, uncertain, alone,” as she says—Marion is asked to serialize her biography by a hard-boiled young magazine editor, Richard Kurt (George Kareman). The potential scandal causes a huge kerfuffle among the egotistical men in her past, including Leander “Bunny” Nolan (Kevin Albert), an image-conscious Senate hopeful; the grotesquely theatrical movie star Warwick Wilson (Simon MacLean); and the vindictive Kurt himself.

Marion is a complicated and delightful female Casanova, and Behrman does not condemn her avowed singlehood by marrying her off, punishing her, or even requiring her to explain it. Shayne gallops across Behrman’s witticisms with charm to burn, and though her acting style and stage presence rarely recall the flapper she embodies as much as women of the ’50s and ’70s, the anachronism reminds us that it’s never been easy for a woman to remain alone.

The chance to see his acclaimed comedy Biography, now at Theatre 3 at the Mint, is something any theater lover ought to jump at.

The prolific playwright S. N. Behrman hardly commands the attention nowadays that he received for his boulevard comedies during the 1920s and 1930s, when he was considered as luminous a light as any dazzling Broadway. So the chance to see his acclaimed comedy Biography, now at Theatre 3 at the Mint, is something any theater lover ought to jump at, especially as it’s presented in Pamela Moller Kareman’s polished, pungent and superbly acted production.

Just about the only thing wrong with the piece is the title Behrman gave the play, which is actually about an autobiography that its heroine, Marion Froude (Tracey Shayne), is prevailed upon to write by editor Richard Kurt (George Kareman). The reason why the caustic Kurt wants Froude’s story between hard covers is that as a free-spirit illustrator who entertains the rich and famous, she has a reputation likely to make anything she writes commercial.

The bucks she could rake in are just what worries her fussbudget ex-boyfriend Leander Nolan (Kevin Albert), who is afraid any mention of their dalliance will harm his chances at the United States Senate — and, maybe worse, jeopardize his engagement to Slade Kinnicott (Sarah Bennett), the daughter of chief political backer Orrin Kinnicott (Keith Barber).

The gracious and warm Froude, on the other hand, believes there’s nothing wrong with the life she leads in her studio, which happens to be one drawing-room where a hefty amount of actual drawing gets done. Also on hand are her short-fused maid Minnie (Cheryl Orsini), on-his-way-to-Hollywood composer Melchior Feydak (Tyne Firmin), and preening actor Warwick Wilson (Simon MacLean).

The suspense of the play — or what there is of suspense wedged between the abundant laughs bouncing off the walls of set designer John Pollard’s cozy artist’s lair — involves whether Froude will stick to the deal with Kurt that’s yielded her a much-needed $2000 advance or whether she’ll acquiesce to Nolan for old time’s sake. It’s a dilemma thickened by her attraction to the somewhat younger Kurt and his slowly-acknowledged attraction to her, despite his scorn for her liberated manner.

Froude’s manner is both the point of the play and an expression of Behrman’s humanitarian philosophy. In his central figure (based on real-life magazine illustrator Neysa McMein), he’s created a woman who defies conventional morality with a personal code to which she determinedly adheres. She realizes her attitude puts her at odds with much of society — even as it endears her to the art and artsy crowd with which she surrounds herself. While refusing to back down and prepared to pay the price for not doing so, she remains warm, wise, and forgiving. Those qualities, more than any others, is what may make Behrman’s otherwise sparkling piece seem dated in today’s much more cynical environment.