Berwick native playwright's characters get 'Entangled'

A path that began in Berwick led Julie Hébert to California, to the Sundance Film Festival and to the sets of some of the most critically acclaimed television shows of the last couple of decades.
And now it’s leading her back to the stage.
A play written by Hébert will be one of six works presented as part of the Rainbow Zebra/Magic Theatre Reading Extravaganza!, a six-month series of new play readings at Magic Theatre in San Francisco.
Hébert’s play, scheduled for Aug. 26, is called “Entangled,” a nod to a mystery of physics: how two particles can remain somehow connected across vast distances. The particles in Hébert’s “Entangled” are two women, and the play turns on how their relationship changes and the way their strength ebbs and flows during a three-day quarantine in 2021 at a duplex cabin in New Mexico.
Hébert didn’t have to reach far beyond herself to imagine her characters. A one-time premed student at Nicholls State, she finished with a psychology degree. As for the physics, “I’m so interested in all this stuff, dark matter and dark energy, and nobody knows what it is,” Hébert said Wednesday in a phone interview from California.
She’s the daughter of the late Earl and Nelwyn Hébert, and sister to Earl Jr., Bradley, Mitch and Janice Hébert. She graduated from Berwick High in 1972 and went on to Nicholls. During her final year there, she remembers, “I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor.”
Her biography says she talked her parents into letting her spend a year working on plays in San Francisco before coming home to medical school.
“I never once imagined it would turn into a career,” Hébert said.
It did, and she never came home for medical school.
In California, according to her online biography, she met “Sam Shepard, Robert Woodruff and other fully dedicated theater artists and realized this was her calling. For the first time she was in a room with people who regarded the Arts as seriously as others regarded Science.” She made her directorial debut with “Cowboy Mouth,” a play by Shepard and Patti Smith. Again, according to her biography: “She will never forget the stomping, standing ovation on opening night, her moment of no return.”
Hébert went on to direct dozens of plays. And she wrote “True Beauties,” with Maria Irene Fornes as her tutor. The Bay Area Critics Circle named it Best Play of the Year.
In the 1990s, she continued to write. Hébert adapted a book called “Female Perversions” — about gender roles, not kink — into a film script. The movie, which starred Tilda Swinton, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Directing proved to be one turning point. Writing was another. Still a third came when she became part of a program run by film and TV producer John Wells. The program focused on bringing women and minorities into creative roles.
The goal was to create directors for the series run by Wells. And Hébert did, directing episodes of “ER,” “The West Wing” and “Third Watch.”
Hébert has also directed episodes of “Numb3rs,” “Nashville,” “Man in the High Castle” and most recently, “American Crime.”
In “Entangled,” her focus is on the physicist, Teresa, 66, and Peregrine, the 35-year-old neuroscientist whose father recently died and whose husband drops Zoom call hints about an open marriage — or at least a fling with a pretty neighbor.
They’re in a cabin owned by a scientific institute.
At first, Teresa punctures Peregrine’s metaphysical musings.
“When Einstein dismissed quantum theory as ‘Spooky action at a distance.’ he was proved wrong, first by the math, then by empirical evidence,” Peregrine said. “Two particles bonded across space and time — a thousand miles apart — one moves, the other moves. How does that work? Why would it not be true for bonded human beings.”
“Now you’re talking about telepathy?” Teresa asks.
“Okay,” Peregrine replies. “What’s your question?”
“My question is what’s the point?” Teresa says.
Much of their interaction takes place in the vicinity of a 72-year-old caretaker named Sydney, a sort of one-man Greek chorus with a hollow leg and a guilty conscience. He also sings lyrics from “Free Bird.”
As the play unfolds, the women are touched by the loss of a life's work, betrayal, loss and finally, physical danger.
What appears to a layman as a challenge to put on stage — intimate conversations in a cabin contrasting with hikes in the wilds of New Mexico — really isn’t, according to Hébert.
“It’s very stage-able,” she said. “You just have to use some imagination.”

This story has been edited to correct the list of Hébert's siblings.