VALDOSTA — “Holler Me Home” is a play about clashing cultures, old vs. new, and seeking a balance between where you’re from and where you’re going.

It is also, as the title suggests, a story about home.

The play marks a homecoming for Debra Fordham, a Valdosta State graduate who wrote “Holler Me Home.” This week, Valdosta State University Theatre presents the world premiere of Fordham’s “Holler Me Home” in Sawyer Theatre.

“It is very gratifying to be a part of the first step in creating a new play,” says show director Dr. Randy Wheeler, “but like a child’s first step, it is often the most exciting.”

A long-time VSU Theatre professor, Wheeler came out of retirement to direct “Holler Me Home” at Fordham’s request.

Fordham is an Emmy-nominated writer on the NBC comedy “Scrubs,” where she has worked since the series’ inception several years ago. Her Emmy nominations came from songs in the show’s musical episode.

A 1991 Valdosta State graduate, she worked professionally in the Bert Reynolds Theatre in Jupiter, Fla., before moving to Los Angeles. In L.A., she discovered a world of job choices in the entertainment industry. She landed a job as a production assistant on the sitcom “Murphy Brown.” A show-business job, however, does not necessarily equal wealth. Fordham had a job with a popular sitcom, but she could not afford to return home to the Tallahassee, Fla.-area where her father worked as a prosecutor, or the more rural homes of her grandparents, aunts and uncles where her father was raised and she spent many a childhood day.

Writing and submitting spec scripts to producers, Fordham was hired onto the writing staff of “Scrubs.” With her new job and its pay, she could finally return home for a visit.

“I came home feeling like this big success,” Fordham says, “but, by the time I went back to L.A., I felt like a failure.”

Her family greeted her as the successful Hollywood writer but, in returning home, she didn’t feel like a success at all. In L.A., she had her writing career, shops, restaurants, money, entertainment, and friends. But she didn’t have the closeness of family, her rural roots, the hustle-and-bustle support of being surrounded by people who knew her and loved her.

In Los Angeles, she had her career but she also lived alone in an apartment. Yet, she couldn’t imagine giving up her career and returning home either.

She recalls that first return home from L.A. to find her aunt skinning a bear in a bathtub. She felt like she was from two different worlds but a member of neither.

This experience, this feeling, would form the basis of “Holler Me Home.” The play is set in the 1930s Okefenokee, before the federal government took control of the region and people, often called “swampers,” lived in the swamp. A Harvard-educated government worker arrives and meets a family of swampers. The play centers on this clash of cultures, swirling around the dueling natures of clinging to the past and progressing toward the future.

Writing the play has given Fordham a catharsis. It is about change, how lives and ways of life change.

“It’s like Dr. Wheeler said, change isn’t necessarily good or bad,” Fordham says, “it’s just inevitable.”

Given her credentials with the comic “Scrubs,” some may expect “Holler Me Home” to be a comedy. It isn’t.

There are humorous moments, Wheeler says, but Fordham describes the play as a drama that treats the swampers as people not the stereotypical rural folks of “Lil Abner” or “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Fordham was careful in how she characterized the swampers, since one of her grandmothers had been a swamper. She notes that actors should not portray “Holler Me Home’s” swampers as objects of ridicule.

Since late last week, she has been able to see how the VSU Theatre student cast portrays her characters. She returned to Valdosta last Thursday and has been attending rehearsals. Opening night is Thursday. Following the Friday and Saturday night performances, Fordham will take questions and comments from the audiences. She may even ask them a few questions. She wants feedback.

What local audiences will see is both a finished play as well as a work in progress. The VSU Theatre production is “Holler Me Home’s” first step, with the next step coming in March when VSU Theatre takes the play to a Dallas-area theatre festival.

Watching rehearsals, Fordham has already seen things she plans to re-write. Things she will change as the play evolves into a show that will hopefully continue finding new venues and more audiences.

“I believe this is a play that will have a life of its own on stages all over,” Wheeler says.

In addition to further developing her play, Fordham’s next steps depend on the aftermath of the writer’s strike. Though she’s been on strike, she can work on plays because they fall under the Dramatists Guild of America.

But she isn’t certain of “Scrubs’” fate. It was the series’ last season so Fordham doesn’t know if the final episodes or a finale episode will be written or produced. Before the strike, she had a development deal for a series pilot with NBC. She may not know if that deal remains until the smoke clears from the strike.

Until then, Debra Fordham will enjoy a few more days in her Southern home before returning home to L.A.



THE CAST: Drew Giles, Kyle Tutton, Raoul Barnick, Rick Patrick, Heather Cross, Lindsey Mouchet, Phillip Jones.



DIRECTION, PRODUCTION: Dr. Randy Wheeler, director; Rich Haptonstall, scenic, lighting design; LeVonne Lindsay, costume design; Marty Lynch, technical director; Deborah Morgan, dramaturg; Katie Cathell, production stage manager; Thomas Poje, assistant stage manager.



WORLD PREMIERE

VSU Theatre presents Debra Fordham’s “Holler Me Home.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Feb. 14-20.

Playwright talkbacks with Debra Fordham immediately follow the Friday and Saturday night performances.

Where: Sawyer Theatre, VSU Fine Arts Building, corner of Oak and Brookwood.

Tickets: $10, adult; $8, senior citizen; $7, child or non-VSU student; $6, group rates of 10 or more; free, VSU student with valid ID.

Reservations, more information: Call VSU Theatre Box Office, 333-5973, between 2-5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.