Welcome back, Dorothea. It’s been a while. First, we got to know you through your scandalous gardening techniques of burying bodies in your Sacramento backyard in the 1980s, a grave situation.
Then, we were reintroduced to you through the play “Dorothea Puente Tells All!” — first staged at California Stage in 2020, then at Sacramento Theatre Company, and now in its current iteration at Big Idea Theatre.
The play and the lead actress who portrays Sacramento’s most notorious landlady remain virtually the same through all three productions. Janis Stevens embodies the dual personalities and multiple layers of Dorothea Puente so convincingly that I wouldn’t want to meet Stevens in a dark alley after the show…