Review: ERMA BOMBECK: AT WIT'S END at Cleveland Play House

“Guilt, the gift that keeps giving.” Marriage has No Guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.” “Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.” “Never go to a doctor whose office plants have all died.” 

What do these quotes all have in common?  They are material written by the subject of the one-person, eighty-minute play, ERMA BOMBECK:  AT WIT’S END, a Suburban Outlaw production now on stage at The Cleveland Play House.

Yes, Erma Bombeck, the woman who wrote such best-selling books as The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, If Life is a Bowl of Cherries—What Am I Doing in the Pits? and Motherhood:  The Second Oldest Profession.

If you are a person of a certain age, Bombeck’s name is familiar, you grew up reading or listening to someone tell you about one of the country’s most beloved humorists, who gave voice to the everyday joys and struggles faced by the women of her day.  As well as being a leading figure in the fight for passage of the ill-fated “Women’s Rights Amendment.”

ERMA BOMBECK:  AT WIT’S END is the product of the combined minds of Chagrin Falls natives Allison and Margaret Engel.  It has been staged in venues in such places as Washington, D.C., Buffalo, Denver, Rochester and, now in Cleveland.

It stars Pam Sherman, one-time writer of her own “Bombeck-like” column, “The Suburban Outlaw,” who was convinced by Mark Cuddy, then Geva Theatre Center’s Artistic Director, and now CPH’s Interim Artistic Director, to play the role at the Rochester, New York facility.  That production broke box office records for productions causing the run to be extended twice due to popular demand.

Erma Louise Bombeck was born in Bellebrook, Ohio, and raised in Dayton. She started her professional writing career at the Kettering-Oakwood Times in 1964, with weekly columns. The following year, the Dayton Journal Herald requested pieces. After three weeks, the articles went into national syndication in 36 major U.S. newspapers, under the title "At Wit's End."   

By the 1970s, her columns were read semi-weekly by 30 million readers of 900 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada.

“Her work stands as a humorous chronicle of middle-class life in America after World War II, among the generation of parents who produced theBaby Boomers.”

“Erma, with her wonderful, pointed wit and her very sharp powers of observation, brought that whole world out into the open,” said Margaret Engel, co-playwright. “Her fans were legion. They loved her because she illuminated their lives which were funny, tragic, comic, interesting, but really had been so unremarked upon before Erma Bombeck took the world by storm.”

The play, presented without intermission, which is set in Bombeck’s “Dayton home,” is directed by Mark Cuddy, and chronicles the facts and fantasies of Bombeck, spoken in her own words.  It is filled with many of her own pet phrases and oft-quoted clever ideas.  

More stand-up comedy act than play, the CPH staging kept the older demographic audience, who seemed to be familiar with many “Bombeckisms,” amused throughout.  

Sherman, a noted actress, as well as a lawyer and writer, was comfortable with the role.  Maybe her long background with the script was in effect the night I saw the show, as she seemed to working on auto-pilot, saying lines, rather than actually giving the illusion of spontaneity of first-time awareness of the clever dialogue.  The lack of dynamism didn’t keep the audience from having a good time.

Capsule judgment:  ERMA BOMBECK:  AT WIT’S END, CPH’s “pre-season treat,” will delight those of a “certain age” who are familiar with the era and role of women as described in Bombeck’s references.  Modern feminists will roll their eyes at many of her situational references.

Tickets for the Outcalt Theatre production, which runs through August 20, are available at clevelandplayhouse.com or by calling (216) 241-6000.

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