By Sarah Farris
Denise Fennell is coming back to Norwell this Sept. 11 and 12, and this time she's bringing the basement of her childhood with her.
There will be wood paneling. Shag carpet. A banana-seat bike. A box of Franzia. And enough familiar parental warnings to transport a generation of New Englanders straight back to childhood.
“Children should be seen and not heard.”
“Keep crying, I'll give you something to cry about.”
Fennell doesn't even have to finish the phrases.
“All I have to do is say the first two words and the audience just screams it back,” she said.
That shared language is at the heart of Lessons Learned: The Time of My Life, Fennell's new show making its Company Theatre debut in Norwell. Part theater, part stand-up and part autobiographical storytelling, the show traces the lessons Fennell absorbed growing up in her New England neighborhood and what happened when she suddenly had to apply them to a very different life.
Here are a few lessons to know before she comes home.
Lesson No. 1: You can go home again
Fennell grew up in the 02458, as she calls it, with Boston-born parents and the kind of neighborhood childhood where doors stayed unlocked, neighbors were extended family and there was usually someone around willing to hand a kid a sandwich.
Her theater career began when she was cast in a touring company of Tony and Tina's Wedding. Mary Pat Donovan, creator and writer of Late Night Catechism, saw her perform and later cast Fennell as one of the show's nuns.
That role eventually brought her to Company Theatre, where she found an unusually strong connection with South Shore audiences.
“When I do a show in Norwell, it's so unique because it's like such a homecoming for me,” Fennell said.
She still remembers an audience member named Norm, whom she first met about a decade ago after his wife had passed away and his daughters brought him to see her perform. He kept coming back. When an illness caused him to miss a performance, Fennell called him from the theater during the show.
“The work as an actor I love, but the audience is who I love,” she said. “That's what I come back for.”
Company Theatre also became important to Fennell as she began creating her own work. The theater was the first to take a chance on The Bride, a show written by her husband and loosely inspired by Fennell getting married at 50. Its reception in Norwell helped propel the show to other theaters around the country.
Now she's bringing Company Theatre something even more personal.
Lesson No. 2: Gen X kids were built differently
In Lessons Learned, there is no nun and no bride for Fennell to disappear into.
“This is me,” she said. “I am Denise Fennell coming back to Boston to share what I believe is a very common way we were all raised.”
That means remembering playground equipment capable of both launching children from significant heights and reaching approximately the temperature of the sun. It means sneaking out of the house in overalls and changing clothes in the bushes, an activity Fennell points out would be considerably more difficult in the age of doorbell cameras.
And it means a particular kind of Gen X self-sufficiency.
“I'm a Gen X latchkey kid,” Fennell said. “I'm untested, undiagnosed.”
The show isn't exclusively for Gen X. One section travels from “boomers to zoomers,” finding humor in what generations share, and what they decidedly do not.
But Fennell expects performing this material for a New England audience to be different.
“I think this is going to be a rock concert,” she said. “In Boston, where this material originated, where all of these characters are from, I can't imagine.”
Lesson No. 3: There is no manual for inheriting teenagers at 50
Fennell was single until 50, when she married and abruptly became a “bonus” parent to two teenagers.
That collision between the childhood Fennell experienced and the childhood she encountered as a parent became one of the central questions behind the show: How does a woman raised in what she calls the “Diet Tab decade” raise kids who grew up in an entirely different world?
It also forced her to reconsider some of those parental warnings she had once dismissed, particularly the promise that someday she'd have children just like herself.
“Then you have kids and they are just like you,” Fennell said. “And then you start reliving all the stuff that you did and you just want to call your parents and apologize to them all day long.”
Lesson No. 4: Dishwasher loading is apparently a marital issue
Fennell's shows aren't designed for an audience that wants to sit quietly in the dark.
She talks to people. She asks questions. She compares experiences. And in Lessons Learned, she even gets into one of domestic life's most unexpectedly contentious questions: How, exactly, should a dishwasher be loaded?
“That can make or break your marriage,” she said. “Who knew?”
The show is structured as a series of monologues, each arriving at a lesson before ultimately connecting with the others. Music runs throughout, and Fennell has created a playlist tied to the performance.
Audience members receive a thank-you card designed like an old mixtape, complete with a QR code that takes them to the playlist.
“I'm from the mixtape generation,” she said.
Fennell describes the atmosphere as loose and interactive: Come in, have a drink, relax and be prepared to laugh.
Lesson No. 5: The funny stuff and the hard stuff can coexist
Underneath the nostalgia and generational jokes is something more complicated.
Fennell and her husband wrote the show around the experience of reaching midlife, when childhood memories can suddenly collide with new responsibilities to children, aging parents and family.
“You're reliving your childhood and you're also taking on a very different role in caring for your parents and caring for your family, and your world shifts,” Fennell said.
Grief is part of that story, too, but Fennell doesn't want it to overwhelm the room. Instead, she uses comedy to create space for people to recognize their own families and memories and perhaps leave feeling a little lighter.
“If I could help that family smile and laugh and remember their dad for a few minutes or their mom or a moment from their childhood that means something to them, then I did my job,” she said.
Lesson No. 6: Bring back the leather pants
There is one final piece of important information for anyone considering a ticket: The leather pants are back.
Fennell said that when she first began dating her husband, she noticed a suspicious correlation between nights when she got particularly “turned up” and nights when she wore leather pants.
She wondered, jokingly, whether the pants might somehow be trapping alcohol inside her body.
The leather pants were eventually placed on what Fennell calls a two-year suspension for “conduct unbecoming a 50-year-old.”
That suspension has ended.
“The fact that I have these leather pants on, anything can happen at this show,” she said.
It's a joke, but it also fits the larger point Fennell wants to make about getting older, particularly for women. At a time when aging is so often treated as something to apologize for or laugh at, she wants to tell a different story.
“There's so much self-deprecation about aging and women,” she said. “I want to approach it from an empowering place, where it's like, we're good. We got this. I look great. I'm in the best years of my life.”
For Fennell, these years are busy. She said her touring schedule now stretches into June, a level of momentum she never expected at this point in her career.
And for a performer whose career began in Boston, one of those better moments will be riding a banana-seat bike onto a Norwell stage in leather pants, surrounded by people who already know how to finish the punchlines.
Hopefully, Norm will be there, too.
If You Go
What: Denise Fennell’s Lessons Learned: The Time of My Life
When: Sept. 11 and 12
Where: The Company Theatre, 30 Accord Park Drive, Norwell
Tickets: Only available through The Company Theatre’s official website