A New York actress still winces over memories of growing up in Bexley in the 1960s.

“I always felt like an outsider,” Prudence Wright Holmes said from New York.

Holmes, known as Tina when she was a student at Bexley High School, graduated in 1965.

“It was very conservative and cliquish, and I was the artistic type,” she said. The school had dances, but Holmes was never asked to dance.

Her salvation: the drama department.

Holmes, 55, hoped to transform her adolescent pain into the healing power of theater by writing and acting in Bexley, OH (!), or Two Tales of One City which opens Monday off-Broadway.

“The tales are just my particular family,” she said, “but the play also shows the prejudice and fear of the era, when the times were changing so much.”

The New York Theatre Workshop, best-known for originating the musical Rent, will present a three-week run of Bexley as the first entry in Cradle and All: The Changing American Family. The spring new-works series focuses on the values and historical forces that have redefined the family in the past half-century.

Her two-act piece combines two monologues, one about each parent:

• Dr Sam Is Under Your Bed focuses on her father and his obsession with the case of Dr. Sam Sheppard, who was convicted of the 1954 murder of his wife.
   

• The African Violet Society revolves around Holmes’ mother, who was active in a ladies club.

“My mother wanted a daughter who’d go to the right parties and date the right people, but I didn’t do that. I was a hippie,” the actress said.

She changes her voice and posture to portray eight characters in the solo piece. Among them: her father, his best friend, her mother, a black maid in dialect and Sheppard’s prosecutor. She also portrays herself at 6 years old and in college.

Playing herself onstage is hard, Holmes said. “You feel kind of naked up there, talking to the audience, so it’s scary. I’d rather play a character.”

As a child, she first began performing in the choir at Bexley United Methodist Church, where she later acted in plays.

During high school, she apprenticed at Ohio State University’s Stadium Theatre and played roles at Players Club, the forerunner of Players Theatre, where she appeared in You Can’t Take It With You and Take Her, She's Mine.

“Right now, it’s pretty fulfilling to do my own one-person show. The frustrating part of an acting career is the ups and downs -- not working and having to try to keep going.”

Although Holmes has written many memory plays about her life, Bexley, OH! is the first to be produced.

“I alternate between excitement and being terrified,” she said. “But I’m learning to laugh at all these events I went through. I just want to set my parents to rest and let it go.” 

Career highlights

• Films: Sister Act, Sister Act II, Kingpin, In Dreams

• Broadway: Happy End with Meryl Streep, Lettice and Lovage with Maggie Smith, Inherit the Wind with George C. Scott

• 0ff-Broadway: GodspeII, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, A Christmas Carol

• Television: Another World; more than 100 commercials, including Wendy’s