“I’m from the East Side. We get things done.” Michele Lepsche is talking about the East Side of St. Paul, where she grew up.

What she’s getting done is staging her first play, “Roller Derby Queen,” which opens Friday.

Lepsche is producing the play. She started the theater company that’s putting on the play. She wrote the play, ran it through readings at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis and hired the actors.

Oh, and after lunch one day recently during rehearsals, she was headed out to buy a pair of jeans to costume the lead character.

She’s getting it done. But she didn’t have a lot of options.

“In all reality, who’s going to produce a 55-year-old Minneapolis housewife’s first play?” Lepsche says with a grin. Related Articles Cowles Center for Dance among first to present live indoor performance with audience

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To understand how she’s getting it done, you have to step back along the path that put her in the playwright/producer spot.

After graduating from Hill Murray High School in 1980, Lepsche paid her way through nursing school and graduated when she was 23. She says she knew she needed a solid career and paycheck.

“I loved being a nurse,” she says. The flexible schedule let her pursue her passions: art school, film school, writing classes. She’s created a feature-length film and has a novel set aside. She studied at Metro State University and has a master’s in creative writing from Hamline University.

Then, one day in a bookstore, she was intrigued by a book on “the art and craft of dramatic writing.” Maybe playwriting was her artistic outlet. She started theater and playwriting classes at Metro State and was told that Normandale had a good two-year theater degree.

“It was the best,” she says of Normandale’s program. “And I’ve been to many schools.”

MEET FLORENCE

“Roller Derby Queen” focuses on Florence, a quirky “collector” who intends to fund her retirement years selling her “treasures” on eBay. The plan goes awry when her younger, live-in daughter finds romance and her older daughter can no longer afford to subsidize Flo’s retirement. Flo has to move out of her house.

Mother, daughters, aging, life changes. It’s pretty intense between Flo and her eldest, Lepsche says. “The power is strong between these two.”

Flo, who “isn’t the most classy person you’ve ever met,” isn’t about to give up her house, Lepsche says. “She’s on her game and she’s ready to fight.”

What it all has to do with the play’s title, Lepsche won’t say. It would spoil a key plot point.

Lepsche talks about all of her characters like they’re family or folks who live across the street. She thinks of the people first, the plot later. “I see them,” she says.

PLAYTIME

Lepsche paid to have her play read at the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis. Well-regarded Twin Cities actors — Raye Birk, Candace Barrett Birk, Carolyn Pool and Sara Marsh — gave voice to her words.

“I didn’t know what it would be like to take the words off a page and give them to people,” Lepsche says. “It added dimension I’d never realized.”

Lepsche says she discovered playwriting is 20 percent words and 80 percent actors.

In true Minnesota style, she didn’t invite anyone to the first reading: “I didn’t want to be embarrassed.” The audience of two included the playwright and a woman Lepsche suspects came into the Playwrights’ Center to get out of the cold.

The actors encouraged a rewrite. For a subsequent read-through, she invited a few friends and family.

More encouraging words, more work on the script and after a third reading, Lepsche was ready to produce her play for paying audiences.

“Then I got a brain tumor,” she says as matter-of-factly as if she were talking about a sore throat. Two years and a lot of determination later, Lepsche was ready again with her play.

She and her husband, Mitchell Blatt, came into an inheritance when Blatt’s mother died, and he suggested the couple use the money to produce the play.

“I’m extremely blessed to be able to do this,” Lepsche says. “I know she would love it,” she adds of her free-spirited mother-in-law, who played upright bass with a band until she was 89.

The actors from the Playwrights’ Center signed on for the run (except Barrett Birk, who has a role in the Guthrie’s “Romeo and Juliet”).

“I think they like the characters,” Lepsche says.

And Lepsche likes what the actors have done to her play. “What they have added to this just blows my mind,” she says.

IMPRESSIVE CAST

Veteran actor Raye Birk says he wanted to be part of the stage premiere because he’s been involved since the first reading. Related Articles Cowles Center for Dance among first to present live indoor performance with audience

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“Her persistence has been so impressive to me,” Birk says of Lepsche, who was always open to suggestions from the actors. He calls the characters quirky, interesting and fun.

Birk describes “Roller Derby Queen” as “kind of old-fashioned,” a character-driven piece with one set and odd characters. “It has the possibility to be quite moving.”

How well it will play, Birk can’t say.

“We won’t know until we get it in front of an audience.”

In the meantime, Lepsche will look to her training as a nurse to stay calm — and her East Side roots to get this thing done.

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