Actor plays his feminist mother in two-act play

“I’m becoming my mother!” Ever found yourself saying that? Actor and playwright Pierre-Marc Diennet takes the notion to a new level by playing his mother in a two-act show, “Perdita,” about the feminist human rights activist Perdita Huston.

Playing at 7 p.m. Sept. 22-23 at the Stonington Opera House, the piece not only spans several continents and decades, but, in the course of two hours, Diennet portrays 14 characters and adopts a panoply of accents. When he speaks as Huston, his voice slides gracefully into blue-blood Mainer. His mother, after all, was a Lewiston native who went to school in France and became a globetrotting do-gooder, most notably for the Peace Corps but also in other official positions. Because of her whirlwind work, Diennet went to India, Pakistan, Algeria, Haiti, Switzerland, England and the United States by the time he was 16. At home, wherever that might have been at any given moment, conversation with guests was about international affairs, universal suffrage and civil rights. Not the usual dinner fare, but Huston was no usual mother.

In part, Diennet wrote the show to explain to his friends the oddity – and profundity – of a childhood framed by a woman who felt passionately, acted decisively and spoke adamantly about equality between the sexes. “If you were a sort of chauvinist guy in the 1950s, you’d call her haughty,” he said. His sensitive portrayal of Huston recognizes the challenges of having a driven mother who uniquely expanded the definition of family life.

“As you watch the show, Perdita gets more and more complicated,” said director Judith Jerome. “All the struggles of her life come into focus. Yet so much of what is achieved in this play happens through humor.” While the script is infused with wit, it ends when the powerhouse herself ended. Not wanting to face the suffering accompanying ovarian cancer, Huston arranged an assisted suicide in 2001.

“Over the course of working on this play, I have discovered that I did this to see my mother around again,” said Diennet. “I miss her and now I can conjure her.” If his mother were alive, how would she judge a play that exposes her good works as well as her lovers, heartbreaks and the difficult balance of family life and career? Diennet chuckled before answering: “I think she’d say: ‘You didn’t talk enough about women.'”