Rebecca Fisher’s magnificent ‘DISASTER’
Former Memphian tells her family’s funny and tragic story in one-woman show
MORE THAN A DECADE has passed since Rebecca Fisher lost her mother. Rather, since her mother was taken. Still, it hasn’t become any less awkward bringing up the murder that shocked Memphis.
Horrified curiosity is a typical reaction from the people she tells. Or fumbling condolences. Is it humanly possible to make “My mother was beaten and stabbed to death” sound less traumatic in a conversation?
“Oh, yes. Yes, I’m OK. Are you OK? I hope I didn’t share too much.”
For a long time, Rebecca kept her physical distance from the past by living the farthest she could from the crime scene, which for her metastasized into the entire city of Memphis with its tendrils of secrets and lies interwoven into the unique social fabric. The family included Hubert Frederick Adrian Fisher (left), Hubert F. Fisher III, Emily Klyce Fisher and Rebecca.
But she couldn’t escape mentally. Not through all the New Age therapy that money could buy in her current home of Oakland, near San Francisco.
“The drive to get it out of me was so strong,” she said. “But I never thought I would tell this story. I just wanted to be a comedienne, do you know? I went to take a solo performance class and felt very safe there. So I thought maybe I’ll just tell a little story about my mom. But I kept telling more...”
Her one -woman show, opening Thursday at TheatreWorks, is called “The Magnificence of the Disaster,” and its title was coined by an aunt who once witnessed an ice storm destroy a New England neighborhood.
As the frantic clean-up began early the next morning, her aunt remarked — in a droll Southern accent — that she didn’t “understand how the Yankees can get out there and clean it up before they have time to absorb the magnificence of the disaster.”
Southerners, says Rebecca, just have a different way of dealing with tragedy.
The Disaster
More than 50 articles have been written over the last 12 years about the murder. There were so many plot twists that even Court TV initially covered the trial.
The day after the Feb. 27, 1995, murder, the lurid and detailed headline in this paper read “Central Gardens Woman is Slain... Intruders Stab Arts Patron, Beat Maid, Ransack Home.”
Emily Klyce Fisher was wellknown for her philanthropy in the arts and her name in the society column. She sat on the boards of the Memphis Symphony, the Memphis Youth Symphony, Theatre Memphis, Ballet Memphis and Art Today.
A descendant of old-Memphis cotton money, she was married to Hubert F. Fisher III, a top - level FedEx executive.
As Rebecca, 36, points out, her family life had elements of Southern gothic fiction. Her home at 1649 Central was old and historic with the requisite white columns and a grand staircase. The family circulated in the world of country clubs, private schools and society galas, and employed AfricanAmerican housekeepers. But behind the facade, dysfunction shaped the lives of the two Fisher children, Rebecca and her younger brother, Hubert Frederick Adrian Fisher.
The parents’ fighting and drinking, their emotional distance and loss of control alienated the kids from their parents and from each other.
For her part, Rebecca became the class clown. In 10th grade, she was kicked out of St. Mary’s Episcopal School for poor academic performance. She did better at another all-girl private school, Hutchison, which fit her outgoing personality.
She’d head to New England for college, like her mother did, getting an English lit degree from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, then moving to Chicago soon after graduation to try an acting career.
Her younger brother, known as Adrian, was a misfit in his parents’ social sphere, pampered and spoiled at home. He sought out AfricanAmerican friends and took on the persona of what Rebecca defines in her play as a “wigger.”
Getting involved with a criminal element as a teenager, he earned the nickname “Snowball” or just “Snow” for his habit of snorting cocaine. His addiction was so strong in 1994 that he began stealing from his mother’s purse, his father’s wallet and a family safe where he pilfered bonds, checks, jewelry and his father’s $7,000 gold Rolex, which he pawned for $2,000.
Adrian probably owed money to bad people. Even though he was at a drug treatment program in Minneapolis when the crime took place, others in his circle knew about his family’s wealth.
On the Monday that Emily Klyce Fisher was killed, two men entered the home. They were probably invited in, which led investigators to believe Emily or her elderly maid, Leester Redmond, knew the assailants, perhaps through Adrian.
One of the men attacked Fisher, stabbing her more than 50 times with a pocket knife as she struggled to defend herself. Redmond, in her 90s, was dragged up and down the stairs as the intruders tried to locate valuables.
Emily Fisher was 52.
Magnificence?
One of the problems with vetting the past, especially the not-so - distant past, is that the story keeps evolving, though a denouement may finally be at hand.
The first trial failed to convict the original two suspects because the only other blood found in the home belonged to an unidentified third person.
Attorneys questioned Redmond’s reliability as a witness because of her poor vision and advanced age.
Everyone, including Rebecca, suspected that Adrian knew more than he was letting on.
After the first trial he even congratulated defense attorneys. Witnesses later suggested that Adrian may have known who the killer was, but by then it was too late.
In April 1999, he died of a drug overdose in a Chicago hotel room. He was 24.
Five years later, in 2004, a $26,000 reward energized the cold case. Two new men were charged and brought to trial. Nothing went smoothly for the prosecution. Thirty-two pieces of evidence were missing, including photos, consent-to - search forms, a blood-spatter report, transcripts, telephone records and other items.
A half- dozen witnesses had died between the first and second trials, including Redmond and Rebecca’s father Hubert, who died last September of cancer.
The finale came this year. Alfred Turner — to whom Adrian allegedly owed $50 — was convicted by a jury in January of facilitation to commit first- degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. And Adrian’s best friend, Aaron D. Williams, who had a record of violent crime, pleaded guilty in April to accessory after the fact in the Fisher case and to an unrelated aggravated robbery for an agreed- on sentence of 8 years.
When the second, disappointing trial ended, Rebecca wrote in a letter to The Commercial Appeal: “I’d like to thank the jurors for their time, consideration, and the respect to which they took their job... ”
That same emotional week in January and after two years of writing and revising, Rebecca opened her show at The Marsh theater in San Francisco, a 110seat venue dedicated to solo performers.
It was so successful, the theater extended the run twice, which finally ended April 28.
“After my dad passed away and the trial was over it was like: ‘There’s just no other emergency that can happen to me,’” she said. “It’s hard for me to believe all that’s happened. Philosophically, it shaped who I am.”
Rebecca’s relatives describe her as an “empath,” someone who earnestly feels what others experience.
She works with children in arts education and has an upbeat personality, often ending her sentences with the question, “Do ya know?” — just to make sure the listener is on the same wavelength.
It was Rebecca’s personality that first impressed director and playwright David Ford, a resident artist at The Marsh.
“A lot of people comment on her physical presence,” Ford said. “You watch her and you can’t stop watching. The way her arms move through space. She’s very funny and gracious.”
She started exhuming her past three years ago in his acting class.
“She was telling some funny stories about her family but not getting at the hard stuff,” Ford said. “She wanted to meet outside the class. I’ve been doing this for 18 years. I’ve heard a lot of hair-raising stories, so my reaction to it was mostly that it seemed like something she needed to tell, but was frightened to tell it.”
The play was developed over several years. In it, Rebecca shape -shifts into most of the people mentioned in this story, people she knew and loved, the majority of whom are now dead.
But the dead, Ford said, help paint a larger picture of life in Memphis. The play becomes a story about the South — its people and its values.
“She’s capable of being funny and acerbic one moment and then turn around and lead you into heartbreak and grief,” Ford said. “You make a much larger connection.”
Rebecca’s paternal aunt, Mary Ann Eagle, traveled to San Francisco to see the show, after learning she was a character in it. “I have to say she is spot on,” said Eagle, a writer. “She captured my sense of ruthless love. My biggest fear was that she wasn’t going to do well. Rebecca is so emotionally vulnerable that I was fearful it was going to be sad to watch — no sophistication, melodramatic. I just couldn’t figure out how she was going to marry humor and tragedy like she was trying to do. She put two years into it and it was like jumping off a bridge. But now I’m so proud of her. It’s such a gesture of love.”
Homecoming
Rebecca hadn’t planned to bring it to Memphis so soon. She and Ford thought maybe Atlanta first — ease into the Southern audiences.
During the run she and Ford asked Southerners in the crowd if anything seemed to jump out as mocking. “Mostly what we were hearing from people is that she got it right,” Ford said. “They seemed happy to have someone showing the fractured lines of their home culture. This story is really an interesting picture of the South during this time. It’s partly a detective story, part about race and economics, parents versus their children, and then coping with a tragedy.”
When a vacancy opened for next weekend at TheatreWorks, an intimate space similar to The Marsh, Rebecca made the leap. The production is co -produced by Playhouse on the Square and Voices of the South. Tickets are moving fast, with Thursday’s opening already sold out.
In Oakland, her apartment is adorned with mementos from the city and the history she left behind. Paintings by Memphis artists — ones her mother bought — hang on her walls.
“Sometimes I think I should move back to Memphis, in order to really consider myself Southern,” she said, then changing her mind: “I think if I had children that would make more sense. Memphis feels like a family town.”
In the end, the city may represent a part of her life best viewed from the perimeter. She sent her final thoughts in an e - mail: “Memphis is where my stories are,” she wrote. “It’s where my parents were both born, raised, and died... Sometimes I get homesick for it. Perhaps a homesickness for my parents. Going back to Memphis makes me feel closer to their spirit .”