'Lovelace' musical gets past the porn

In 1972, a newlywed named Linda Boreman spent six days in Florida making a low-budget porn film about a woman who can't orgasm. The director was a salon owner who decided to make blue movies after hearing his female customers complain about their husbands' bedroom techniques. The male lead had been part of the lighting crew until the producers realized they couldn't find anyone else.

The movie was "Deep Throat," starring Boreman under the stage name Linda Lovelace, and it went on to gross millions of dollars, shift sexual mores in America and unleash a national debate on cultural permissiveness.

But "Deep Throat" was only a brief episode in the turbulent life of a woman whose nickname had been "Miss Holy Holy" in Catholic school. The child of strict disciplinarians, Boreman went from oral-sex fatale to feminist crusader. She finally found some peace as a mother before dying, near penniless, from injuries sustained in an auto accident in 2002. She was 53.

Now Boreman has become the subject of a stage production that bears her stage name: "Lovelace: The Rock Opera" is a collaboration -- and a breakthrough -- by Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go's and Anna Waronker of the band that dog. For them, Boreman's dramatic story touches raw nerves.

"I have a heavy-duty connection with this material on a lot of levels," Caffey says. "To work on it has really been transformative."

The project was originated by playwright Jeffery Leonard Bowman, who knew immediately after reading Boreman's obituary that he wanted to tell her story.

A mutual friend introduced Caffey to Bowman, and the two, along with Waronker, worked on the project for several years before they brought it to Hayworth Theatre creative producers Danna Hyams and Gary Blumsack.

In many ways, "Lovelace" was the project Caffey and Waronker had been waiting for since they met in 1995. Sitting on a sofa in the Hayworth green room during rehearsals, the women seem uncannily in sync. Both petite, blond and dressed in black, the voluble pair don't so much finish each other's sentences as infinitely extend them. They are sisters-in-law -- Waronker married Caffey's husband's brother -- and the two have produced music together as Five Foot Two Records. Their first collaboration was the theme for the TV version of "Clueless" -- a world away from the bruised heart of "Lovelace."