Work to do Opening doors with Pat Hegnauer BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

So what has Pat Hegnauer been doing with herself lately? Once she was a creative mainstay of off-Trinity theater, at 2nd Story Theatre alongside co-founder Ed Shea, who did most of the lead acting while she did most of the directing. But nowadays you don’t usually see her at Shea’s resurrected 2nd Story digs in Warren, except on opening night.

And what’s with that oxygen bottle that accompanies her like a faithful lap dog?

Then there are those intimate little dramas she has been staging in informal settings, and those poetry readings here and there.

Why has Pat Hegnauer been peeking out now and then and teasing us with her talent? Her friendly manner on those occasions doesn’t signal a Greta Garbo "I vant to be alone" attitude in the works.

Well, she explains, the reason is called alpha-1 anti-trypsin deficiency, a genetic disease.

"My lungs start to scrub, to get things cleaned, and then go into self-destruction," she says. "I began to realize about age 36 that I was having a hard time breathing. I thought it was asthma, perhaps. It wasn’t until about 1985 that they discovered what I had; they can pick it up in your blood. It is a terminal disease — you keep destroying your own lungs, although I get an infusion once a month of something that I’m missing, and that has held it at bay for quite a while.

"There’s no recovery. All you want to do is slow down the process," she continues. "The reason I can’t work in schools and stuff with kids is that a cold could put me into pneumonia and kill me."

Hegnauer, 61, is speaking after a performance of The Eden Diaries, sitting in a study at Central Congregational Church on the East Side of Providence. Her one-act play, adapted from two amusing stories by Mark Twain, had just been presented there as a benefit for Hamilton House.

So nearly four years ago, when doctors told her she had to quit teaching at St. Andrew’s School, in Barrington, she suddenly had a lot of time on her hands.

Writing was something she’d been doing, casually, forever — poems from grade three, plays from grade five. Hmmm . . . Time to get serious?

Her "yes" to that question has been echoing like rolling thunder ever since. Yeses, actually. A couple of years ago, she got a little poetry group going with former Newport Review editor Michelle Cooper and award-winning poet Barbara Schweitzer, all committed to showing up every Thursday night with two new poems. Hegnauer started getting poetry published in little magazines. As the Write Sisters, they give readings here and there. And two years ago, Hegnauer started a playwriting group, with which she has written 15 or so one-act plays. Some of them have been staged off-off-Broadway at Tribeca Theatre and The Raw Space.

Let’s see . . . poetry, short plays . . . oh, yes, her productivity has also included writing her first full-length play, The Perennial Garden, which finally is ready for production. It’s about a troubled teenage boy coming into the lives of two sisters, one of whom is suddenly the reluctant caretaker of the other. And Hegnauer’s first novel now has a last chapter and is into rewrites. The Kitchen Diary draws from her adolescent years listening to stories from Southern old-timers and figuring out prejudice in Roanoke, Virginia.

"I have never been happier in my life," Hegnauer says. "To be able to grab a cup of coffee and be able to sit down and write poetry right away? One could complain? I don’t think so."

She sounds like she means it.

"When I left teaching, the workers’ comp doctors said that I had five years to live," she says. "Well, I just think that’s crap. That means I have two years left, according to them. I just laugh. I look in the mirror and say, ‘I don’t know, you’re looking pretty good to me.’ "

Hegnauer has precedent as well as optimism on her side. Back in 1992 she was informed by a doctor that she had a brain tumor bigger than a golf ball and might not have long to live. It turned out to be benign and mostly removable.

"The wonderful thing is that people tell you you’re going to die, but we’re all going to die anyway," she says. "It’s a little reminder that you’d better get up off your ass and do it!"

Smiling mischievously, her red hair competing with her raspberry-colored dress for attention, Hegnauer is showing her true colors. Suddenly it is 20 years ago this month at 2nd Story Theatre, when she was playing the spunky Dede Cooper, the never-give-up theater director in Ladies At the Alamo. Hegnauer is an Equity actor, trained at the Goodman in Chicago, no less. But as she speaks her mind I don’t believe, having known and admired her all those years, that she is acting.

"I’m not at all afraid of dying," she insists. "What I want is to do what I’m capable of doing — writing, working with people on plays. All of this stuff is such a gift. One door shuts, three more open."