Inspired by Polly

<p>Rebecca Louise Miller, an actress/playwright who grew up in Santa Rosa and for a time attended school with the late Polly Klaas, will pry herself from Brooklyn next month to pay a visit home.</p><p>Rebecca is scheduled to be at Sebastopol's Main Stage West and Ensemble Theatre Collective on the weekend of Feb. 18 to talk about her play, “Fault Lines.”</p><p>Much of her inspiration to write it flowed from the 1993 abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas. Polly lived in Petaluma when a monster named Richard Allen Davis crept into her home, but earlier her family had resided in Santa Rosa.</p><p>Rebecca and she had been classmates at Hidden Valley School. The shock of Polly's slaying stayed with Rebecca as she went on to graduate from Santa Rosa High's Artquest, then Brown University and the O'Neill National Theater Institute.</p><p>Her “Fault Lines” will be staged 10 times in Sebastopol between Feb. 10 and 25.</p><p>It's the fictitious story of Jessica, a victims' rights activist who returns to Sonoma County to memorialize a friend kidnapped and killed 20 years earlier. Jessica becomes holed up with two childhood girlfriends, one who'd also been a friend of the murdered girl, and the other “a counterculture, pill-popping alcoholic.”</p><p>When the play opened off Broadway in 2009, critic Michael Roderick called it “a new gem of a show” that “could be this generation's ‘Crimes of the Heart.'”</p><p>Polly should have celebrated her 31st birthday Jan. 3.</p>