Remembrance: For more than 60 years, Mary Piona brought a quirky stardom to her chosen role as beloved community-theater anchor
By Doug Hoagland
Mary Piona liked to tell her actor friends: “Aren’t we lucky to do this?”
For decades, Valley audiences were the lucky ones as they watched Piona create golden moments on stage.
Pictured in rotating gallery above: Mary Piona in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “Deathtrap” and “A Trip to Bountiful.” Photos: Good Company Players
In parts big and small, her finely-tuned comedic timing produced laughter, and her dramatic depth left people in tears. In Piona, there was an authentic person bringing to life characters who themselves became genuine, interesting and worthy of an audience’s attention.
Piona died Oct. 28 after an illness, friends said. She was in her late 70s.
“She’d come on in a show, and the audience would feel: ‘I want to know more about this person,” friend and actor Henry Montelongo said. “There was this aura about her.” He referred to her as “Dowager Empress” and addressed her as “Your Highness” because of a high regard for her talent. Piona admitted to Montelongo that she enjoyed the titles.
“I’ll miss her every day,” said another actor friend, Gordon Moore. “It’s such a loss.”
Friends use the word “quirky” – with affection – to describe Piona. In recent years, for example, she carried a red clown nose when out on the town with friends, and when she felt the urge, she’d plop it on her face.
With those friends, Piona loved to talk about old movies, the character actors of the 1930s and ’40s, and anything about performing. One example: She would go in-depth on the talent of Mel Blanc in his voicing of Bugs Bunny.
Another actor friend, Jonathon Hogan, told me: “I just loved her authenticity, and I’m not saying that to blow smoke. You just really couldn’t put Mary in a category.” He added: “If you were able to break through, Mary was very easy to be around. She wasn’t overly complex, but at the same time, she had depth. I mean, true depth.”
In that depth, she guarded her personal life. When her husband, Robert – whom she jokingly described as the “big white guy” – died several years ago, Piona was slow to share the news.
“You couldn’t delve too deeply, and her friends respected that,” Moore added.
CLIPPINGS FROM A LIFE ON STAGE 
Piona’s last appearance on stage came this spring in “The Front Page” for Good Company Players. She had pneumonia during rehearsals, and she developed heart issues during the run of the play. Piona played a minor role – a cleaning woman – and was fully committed to the show, Montelongo said. “She would have difficulty making it from her truck into the theater, but as soon as she hit the stage, the adrenalin would kick in, and you couldn’t tell.” Her health problems eventually led Piona to step away before the show closed.
At that time, she believed she was finished with acting, Montelongo said. But 10 days before she died, Piona was talking about returning to the stage as soon as she was better. “I was heartened to hear that,” Montelongo said. “It signified to me that she was still in the fight.”
Piona told Montelongo: “You know, Henry, I just love the theater. I love being on stage.”
A swinging witch
Piona’s first role came in high school in Dinuba, the small city in Tulare County where she was born. She played a medium. “I remember it quite well. It was March 1964,” Piona told me when I wrote about her for The Fresno Bee in 2006.
Early in her performing years, Piona enrolled in a summer workshop at Fresno State. Dan Pessano – today GCP’s managing director, back then beginning his career – cast her as the witch in a production of “Hansel and Gretel. ”
Pessano had a vision for how his witch would make her entrance. She would jump off a platform while attached to a line, “fly” in from the wings and land on the stage in spectacular fashion.
In rehearsal, the tech crew put Piona in a vest and attached it to the line. Because the crew hadn’t adequately considered Piona’s small stature – she was under 5 feet tall – she swung like a pendulum. Back and forth, back and forth. Finally her feet found the stage.
With perfect timing and complete spontaneity, a youthful Piona mimicked a witch’s cackle – but in a lowered voice – to utter a bored-sounding “Ha-ha.” She was communicating to all concerned: “Well, that was a stupid idea.” Over the years, Piona and Pessano would laugh about that memory.
In that moment, Piona showed an instinct and talent for comedy, which she often used to maximum effect over the years. “Mary would never miss a chance to add a fourth or fifth take when one take would have done it,” Pessano said with a chuckle. “She was a ham.”
The strawberries call
On her way to iconic status in Valley theater circles, Piona played the real role of dutiful daughter. One year as a young adult, she got a job in Yosemite, cleaning cabins, drinking wine and carousing a bit, she told me in 2006. Then she heard from her “Pop,” as she called him. “You gotta come back because it’s strawberry season,” he told her.
So she came back, and she remained there for her adult life, working at the family’s fruit and vegetable stand.
Piona explained her decision this way: She was an only child in an Old World Italian family. Her parents almost loved her too much, she said, and they depended on her to stay and help on the Selma acreage where they had moved. Her parents had things for her to do on the land, and she had her plays in Fresno.
“My pop would come see my shows in an old beat-up pickup, and he’d always say, ‘That was the best play ever,’ ” Piona told me in 2006.
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Many of her early performances came at Fresno Community Theater and then at Theatre 3, where she found a mentor in the late Gordon Goede, Theatre 3’s founder and artistic director. They were both strong-willed, and they sometimes “butted heads,” Montelongo said. But lessons learned from Goede stayed with Piona as the years passed. “She would tell me, ‘Do you remember when Gordon said we had to do this or stand there.’ She’d mention specific things that he told her.”
Pessano at GCP would become the other major influence in her life, Montelongo said. “That’s about who Dan is. He’s a great director who cares for his actors. They become like part of his family, especially someone like Mary who was with him all these years.”
Pessano said many actors in Fresno’s close-knit theater community had almost a reverence for Piona. “But,” he added, “if you want the other side of that coin, when her competition saw her walk into an audition, I don’t think they were in the fan base.” Bottom line: She was formidable competition for roles that she went after.
‘Sound of love’
Piona’s comedic talent and dramatic prowess were inseparable, Pessano said: “You can’t be as funny as she was without having huge dramatic depth because that’s how you get to the truthfulness in comedy.”
She showed dramatic depth in leading roles in GCP shows like “A Trip to Bountiful” and “Driving Miss Daisy.” In 2009’s “Bountiful,” she played Mrs. Carrie Watts, an elderly woman who lives with her son and daughter-in-law and must sleep on their sofa.
Donald Munro (then the arts writer for The Fresno Bee) wrote that Piona’s authenticity allowed her to turn a scene with no dialogue into a moment not soon forgotten. He said that Piona “padding around and getting ready for bed” on the sofa stayed with him for years. “There was something heartfelt and tender in the way her character accepted her lot in life, but also a steely hint of determination.”
That determination was to return one last time to Bountiful, the tiny Texas town where Mrs. Watts grew up.
A scene from ‘Elf.’
In 2014, Piona played an Italian grandmother in GCP’s “Over the River and Through the Woods.” (In real life, she had no children.) In the play, four grandparents (all Italian) struggle to see their beloved grandson make his way in life, which involves moving away from them.
At the end of the play, Piona’s character is the last surviving grandparent. Moore, who played Piona’s husband, recalled: “It’s a hilarious show and full of laughs. But at the end, the audience is weeping because of the sense of isolation that Mary conveyed. She was able to inhabit that character, and become who that grandmother was. She was able to become whoever she was playing. It was just moving to be on stage with her.”
Montelongo added: “Mary knew how to live and be real on stage, whether it was funny or serious. Not all actors can do that.”
Piona developed a following upon theatergoers in Fresno. When she made her first entrance during shows at GCP’s 2nd Space Theatre, a ripple of recognition and excitement from the audience would sometimes greet her, Pessano said. He calls it “the sound of love.”
Some actors learned how much audience members liked Piona when the script called for those actors to behave poorly towards her. Valerie Munoz, a veteran GCP performer, played the controlling, vain daughter-in-law in “A Trip to Bountiful.” She was not kind to Piona’s character.
“The audience loved her and hated me,” Munoz said. “I literally got boos and hisses during bows. It was like, ‘How dare you do that to Mary Piona.’ And they would leap to their feet when Mary came out because, you know, she was just incredible.”
Munoz offered an interesting sidenote about Piona in “A Trip to Bountiful.” “Rehearsal was a little hard for her, and she’d sometimes cut up because the sincerity was sometimes too much for her. In the end, she did it perfectly.”
Piona didn’t expect perfection in herself, and she could be clear-eyed about her performances. “When she was in a show, she’d sometimes walk out of the theater and say, ‘Well, that didn’t go well,’ ” Hogan said. “As an actor, some nights are good nights, some are bad nights and sometimes you have spectacular nights.”
When Hogan had a bad night and Piona was in the audience, she brought the same candor to their friendship. “Jonathon, you weren’t very good. Why did you make that choice with your character?” she would ask. Hogan’s reaction? “I loved it. It was honesty without judgement.”
Moore remembers Piona’s honest reaction to performances that she believed were missing the mark. She would sit in the audience at 2nd Space Theatre, her hands pressed against her face and mouth open in an expression of “Oh, my god ‘No’.”
She believed all actors needed to take the work as seriously as she did, Montelongo said. He recalled Piona once doing a show with a young actor in the cast. In her view, that young actor didn’t fully engage in the production. Montelongo tried to mollify her, but she refused to accept any excuses. “ ‘No-o-o-o, Henry, no-o-o-o,’ ” he remembers her saying. “She didn’t think the young man respected the work.”
‘Quality time’
One of Pessano’s memories of Piona is her at the fruit stand in Selma. To visit her there was to experience the precision, and attention to detail, that she brought to her work on the stage.
“If you wanted a watermelon, she would take time to pick out the right one,” Pessano said, adding that it was reminiscent of markets in Italy where shopping is a process to be savored and enjoyed.
Fellow actors and audiences that savored her work won’t soon forget Piona.
Said Pessano: “She spent quality time at the fruit stand, and she spent quality time with us – the people she loved.”
A celebration of life for Mary Piona is scheduled from 12-3 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 21, at Roger Rocka’s Dinner Theater.
