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Over the next two shows of her Laundry trilogy, we got to know boyfriend Frank quite well. When we last heard of the couple, it was in the third leg of the trilogy, Wedding Bell Hell, and it looked as if solid marital bliss were entering Sandra's life. Perhaps the next instalment would feature diapers, baby food and first steps.
It was not to be. After buying a farm (called "Wit's End'') Frank phones up one day and it's all over. He wants a divorce.
Once again, in Wit's End, this masterful storyteller has woven an entertainment out of the strands of her own life. Yes, Shamas makes us laugh - long and hard and continuously - but there is pain here too. Deep, searing pain. The kind of pain that leaves you helpless and hopeless. Like Julia Sweeney in her one-woman show, And God Said, Ha!, Shamas recounts a tortured personal odyssey, peeling the layers back to reveal a breaking heart at the centre. And then she uses humour to pull herself (and us) out of the depression that follows.
"You know there's a saying - 'one day you're going to laugh about this.' Well, tonight's the night,'' promises Shamas.
The words flow from the performer with an easy grace. She hides any theatrical artifice and seems to be making no effort at all to be dramatic while fearlessly soaring through some heavy emotions.
The first half of the evening is the most remarkable. For an hour, Shamas transcends the stand-up element to create that most elusive of all theatrical happenings - she makes us laugh and cry at the same time. She is as much actor as comedienne and it's the aching vulnerability and truth of her performance that wrenches us. She also has flawless timing and the ability to turn an emotion around in the blink of an eye.
She tells us that if she tries to make it funny, the laughs stop coming. "You have to tell the truth and the audience will let you know when it's funny.''
She sure does that and on opening night, the audience responded with gales of laughter.
The second half of the show has to do with her efforts to put herself back together and it plays more as a stand-up routine. It also runs perilously close to Rod Beattie's Letter From Wingfield Farm territory, in which a city dude tries his hand at running a farm in rural Ontario. Mind you, that's not bad territory for any performer to find herself in and Shamas is a great storyteller.
In the course of this genuine, heartfelt and very funny evening a number of things end for Sandra Shamas.
Her wit wasn't one of them.
Wit's End plays on the Shoctor Stage of the Citadel through Oct. 21.