Los Angeles Times Friday, April 20, 2000

Doris Baizley wrote Mimi's Guide as the second installment in a trilogy. The first play My Rebel, was produced in Los Angeles in 1989 and later rewritten as Tears of Rage.
But Mimi's Guide, at the Fremont Centre Theatre, is a curious sequel. Baizley reinvents the central character, Mimi, giving her a different back-story. Two members of a Vietnam-era love triangle are reunited 26 years later. Although this production finds emotional heat in a new triangular confiuration, the script is self-conscious and borders on melodramatic.
A loutish poet, Waterman (Michael Genovese), whose poetry collections are "guides" using Mimi's experiences as their primary source, is a visiting lecturer at a Louisiana college. He brings along his "muse," Mimi (Lauren Letherer), to a romatically rundown two-story writer's residence (designed by Richard Scully).
Yet Mimi is also his caretaker. If he doesn't want to teach a seminar or attend a book signing, she goes instead, smoothing out his life without receiving any academic acclaim for herself.