Month: February 2016

Germantown Community Theater went big with their production of A.R. Gurney’s two person play Love Letters. In most cases Gurney’s epistolary script requires almost nothing to produce other than a pair of great actors. GCT chose to cast six actors divided into three casts, giving fans an opportunity to make repeat visits and never see the same show twice.

It’s been a different kind of process for director Tony Isbell and his stable of performers — Greg Boller, Pamela Poletti, Chris Cotten, Lorraine Cotten, Sam Weakly, and Tamara Wright. To provide readers a bit of behind the scenes insight Intermission Impossible has collected a handful of loving letters between Isbell and actors from his three casts. 

Tony Isbell

Dear “Love Letters” Casts,

Well, the show is finally up and running!

I’ve told you all how much I love the work you are doing. I couldn’t ask for more committed, talented folks to work with.

It has been a new experience for me to direct three casts simultaneously, especially in a show like this that is not quite a “normal” script.

It occurs to me that people might be interested to hear what the experience has been like for you, as actors. We talked about this some during rehearsals, but I wondered if you might share how this show has been different because of its structure? Was anything easier? Was it all more difficult? How did you approach your characters and your relationship with your partner, given that there is no blocking and no eye contact?

Would love to hear what you think!

Tony

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Greg Boller:

Dear Tony,

Doing this show is like doing Suzuki method with your ears. You have to listen so very carefully to not only what your partner is saying but also how they are saying it. I focus very carefully on the sound (music) of Pamela’s voice — like I might attend to the sound (music) of a woodwind instrument. I think this helps with the on-stage intimacy that these characters need to have if the audience is going to believe the 48 year trajectory of their friendship.

Pamela and I got together for our own rehearsal prior to opening, and we met at Republic Coffee to read the show. Because we had an audience (of coffee drinkers) overhearing us, it forced us to seek a slightly more hushed, intimate, private conversational tone in how we read. We both really liked the discoveries we made in the process and brought it on-stage for the first time for F&F and then again for opening.

How have I connected to Andy? Easy — from the standpoint of someone who has ever had a deep, abiding friendship with another who you could have been romantically intimate with but instead stayed emotionally intimate. Cross-sex friendships (like Melissa and Andy’s) are very special, but exceeding difficult to maintain as the friends find romantic life partners — the emotional intimacy of the friendship puts a lot of stress on the romantic lives of those people. And we see that play out in the emotionally wrenching change in Melissa and Andy’s relationship toward the end of the show. So yeah, if you’ve ever had a very close cross-sex friendship (that’s different from your romantic relationships), it’s very easy to connect with Andy’s experiences in this play.

Greg

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Lorraine Cotten:

Dear Tony,

I love how the three of us women are so different, yet it is not surprising to me that we

 are all three cast as Melissa. That is one of the loveliest things about the incredible writing in this piece to me. It has such universal truths that we can all find ways to connect with them- especially if we have “lived” a bit.

The most challenging thing about finding Melissa (for me) has been discovering when the cracks in her shell are invisible and when she is fully exposed. She is a dichotomy. She’s extremely complicated and simple at the same time.

Another challenge has been acting while sitting in a chair and not being able to “play” with Chris (who is playing Andy) in the way I’m used to playing with actors onstage. We don’t look at each other. We are reading the letters so I am responding to what he has written and the way I (as Melissa) hear his voice as he’s reading it. It is freeing because I am not bound to movement and focused completely on his voice and what he is saying and what I am saying. It also requires a different kind of focus than I use in a typical fully-blocked play. I think of myself as a character actor who uses my body quite a lot when I become the character. This performance limits my ability to use my body and forces me to rely more on my voice.

Yet another challenge has been defining the quick transitions within the letters. You have been a great help with that. Each time I read it I find new ways to connect with Melissa and what she is feeling and I fall a little more in love with both Chris and Andy every performance – especially when he surprises me with a little caress on the back of my neck just before we begin the play. It’s a memory I will always cherish.

Lorraine

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Tamara Wright:

Dear Tony,

My bestie was asking me if I was excited to open the show and I found it difficult to answer. Trepidation, dread, shame were probably much more appropriate responses, but mostly an overwhelming need to ‘get it out’ of me. I’d say the most difficult part of the process has been diving into places that are usually kept covered and on a back shelf. If it isn’t obvious, I’m a method actor.

I had an immediate visceral reaction to the script. I made the mistake of reading it at work and was a hot mess, crying my eyes out in my cubicle. Damn you, A.R. Gurney! It should have come with a warning! I

connected with Melissa on a deeply personal level; in fact, there are several lines that barring a name change, I have actually written to a past love….I knew I had to play her.

It is rare that I get upset about not 

being cast, but with this one…well, thank God, you made the right choice! The opportunity to play Melissa couldn’t have come at a more perfect time in my life. And I’m not sure if I’d have been able to do the role justice any sooner in my career.

My favorite part of the show? That’s easy. It’s listening to my wonderful cast mate, Sam, speak declarations of love so beautiful and heartfelt you’d have to be made of stone not to be moved.

Tamara

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CHRIS COTTEN:

Dear Tony,

As to the first question, my acting process always starts at a place as close to myself as possible, so the question of how I connect with the character on a personal level is always the first one I ask.

For this character, it was his relationship with his father. Like Andy, I had a father who instilled in me a very specific set of ethics against which to measure my choices in almost any situation. I also lost my father at almost the exact age that Andy lost his. I think that there is an undercurrent of resentment in Andy’s relationship with his father that I can’t relate to personally, but overall, that relationship was a way into his story for me. 

As to what makes this show a unique challenge, a couple of things stand out. A wise 

director once told me that acting starts at the end of your nose. So much of a performance is watching, listening, and reacting to your fellow actors in a scene. For this show, one of those tools is taken away. I can’t look at Melissa and react to her physical cues, so that means I have to listen that much more closely. For that reason, you absolutely CANNOT check out mentally for even a moment with this show, and as a result, for a play where you’re just sitting in one place reading for two hours, it consumes a surprising amount of energy.

Another challenge unique to the epistolary format of the play: Andy says that letters are a way of presenting your best self to another person. In that way — particularly in a lot of Andy’s correspondence — the letters are unreliable narrators, and are loaded with subtext that is often quite different from the words that are actually being spoken.

Chris

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Tony Isbell:

Dear Casts:

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions! Here’s to a successful run! Enjoy!

Tony

Christina Wellford Scott as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine comforts Gabe Beutel-Gunn portraying her son Richard, in The Lion in Winter at Theatre Memphis on the Lohrey Stage, January 22 – February 7, 2106.

The witty, ornamental banter that makes The Lion in Winter such a joy when it clicks can also be the filigreed anchor that drowns the 47-year-old show in its own stilted cleverness. What the dialogue reveals about the play’s characters is never half as interesting as what it hides.

On the surface, James Goldman’s play appears to revolve around a power struggle between King Henry II of England, his steel-cut wife Eleanor, Queen of the Aquitaine, and their three horrible sons who all want to succeed daddy on the throne. Personal dramas are built around the squabbling royals, but the play’s central conflict — a furnace that should keep this plays engine sparking for ages to come — is raw barbarism in all out war with the veil of civilization. Director Irene Crist’s production at Theatre Memphis cuts much closer to the heart of this play that the costume drama version she starred in on the same stage a dozen years ago. But Crist, and her able cast, have fallen into the same traps that turn what should be a tense encounter into a light Medieval drawing room dramedy. Let’s call it Noel Coward’s Game of Thrones.

Crist’s Lion gets a lot right. Jack Yates’ unit set projects an air of impregnability, but his compact castle is a subtle shape shifter, and as pliable as it needs to be. André Bruce Ward’s costumes are the perfect mix of thick fur pelts, rough textile, metal and and fine fabric. Jeremy Allen Fisher’s lighting lacks texture, but that’s a small complaint. It’s also one of the very best examples I’ve seen locally of using lighting to edit out all the stuff we don’t need to see. The problem is, there’s just not a lot action to frame. 

Charles K. Hodges (seated, center). He is flanked far left by Jeff Posson and far right by Nic Picou and surrounded by (clockwise from bottom left) Damian Stuchko, Emma Vescovo, Christina Wellford Scott and Gabe Beutel-Gunn.

Maybe it’s wrong to say there’s not enough action. What’s missing is life. Passion. Greed. Pettiness. Loathing. Envy. Lust. World without end. The actors take polite turns speaking well crafted lines, move on cue, and pose regally. There’s never much tension, even when the knives and swords come out. 

I haven’t read enough of the Game of Thrones backstory to know just how much fantasy author George R. R. Martin borrowed from the history books. I do know his barrel-chested, pot-bellied King Robert Baratheon has always reminded me of an amalgamation of Henry II, and his father William the Conquerer, right down to the character’s death in a hunting accident. Like Henry, Robert’s a pistol — an able, sometimes brutal warrior who’s happy to make a law now and then when he’s free and when he needs to — but he’d much rather be out hunting, drinking and fathering bastards. Charles K. Hodges is a strong performer and a good choice for Henry, but there are key aspects of the character he simply fails to communicate. Henry’s not some sage older gentleman, full of restraint and reflecting on youthful indiscretions. He’s still a man able and willing to behead rivals while bedding contessas, milkmaids, courtesans, novices, whores, gypsies, jades, and little boys. Hodges talks a good show, but the stories his Henry tells are always at odds with his gentle bearing. Hodges is never dangerous, even when he’s holding a sword. There is something basically decent about him and we get the sense Henry might even make a damn fine husband to any wife who didn’t lead civil wars against him.

I make the comparison to Game of Thrones here because those three words so accurately sum up what The Lion in Winter is. Also, dialogue written for the enormously successful HBO series, can be quite clever and civilized. But viewers are never allowed to forget that the royal inhabitants of Westeros, no matter how finely arrayed, are serial killers and gluttons who guzzle wine, fuck indiscriminately, bathe sporadically, and shit in chamber pans by the bed. The Lion in Winter can’t just tell us about characters, the play also has to show us who they really are. Audiences should think they can smell rotten breath behind all those pretty words. We need to know, no matter how much Henry’s family, friends, and foes may attract or amuse us, none of them can be trusted when backs are turned. To that end, Hodges’ Henry is too grounded and affable — too much the victim of his family tragedy, and not enough the swinging dick whose preoccupations set all the bloody nonsense in motion.

Emma Vescovo as the determined Alais has a flirtatious moment with Charles K. Hodges.

The brothers Richard (Gabe Beutel-Gunn), Geoff (Jeffrey Wellford Posson), and John (Damian Stuchko) are all superbly cast, and each player has his moments. But they don’t always play well together. As a group they can be wooden, with little sense they’d all be happy to knife one another in the dark. Stuchko nails aspects of John, the venal little shit who Henry loves best. But there’s so much more to his character than stomping to some remote corner of the stage and plopping down in a huff.

Much of the Lion in Winter‘s plot is pegged to Alais (Emma Vescovo) — the sad Sansa of this story. She’s having an affair with Henry, who wants to marry her to John, but she’s promised to Richard, and her brother King Phillip of France is prepared to make sure promises are kept. Unless something better comes along. In a contest of kings, queens, and princes, she’s the only pawn, and treated as something of an afterthought. Nic Picou is purposeful and effective as Phillip, and possibly the play’s most fully realized character.

I feel like a one note singer in regard to Memphis actor Christina Wellford Scott. So often I find her to be a spark of life in otherwise wooden ensembles. That’s not entirely the case here, but it it often is. She shares some nice moments alone, with both Beutel-Gunn, and with her real life son Jeff Posson, whose Geoffrey is one of this productions most pleasant surprises. Poor Geoff is often reduced to a sore-tail schemer — part Varys, part Tyrion Lannister. Posson never goes too arch and sacrifices easy laugh lines to flesh out a middle child character who’s taken too many knocks to make jokes.

Eleanor is such a plum role, and Scott’s a good fit for it. Like Henry, she’s wild at heart, and war hardened. She’d hang jewels from her nipples but it would shock the children. It’s Henry who says, “be gaudy and to hell with it,” but Eleanor has always lived that line out loud. It’s easy to make her the Beatrice to Henry’s Benedict, or the Kate to his Petruchio. But she’s so much more Cersci Lannister — a dangerous would be monarch cursed to be born female. We feel every one of her feels, and enjoy her manipulations but, as with Henry, it’s the danger that’s missing.

The Lion in Winter didn’t make much of an impact when it landed on Broadway in 1966. That was also the year of Peter Brook’s groundbreaking Marat/Sade, and a talky, old-fashioned plays like Goldman’s seemed like yesterday’s news. It wasn’t reconsidered until 1968 when the film version was released with Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn as Henry and Eleanor, and a supporting cast that included Anthony Hopkins, Timothy Dalton, and Nigel Terry. With good editing and a soundtrack to help it move along, the film brought an intimacy — and sometimes a claustrophobia — to material the that’s difficult to mirror on stage. What wouldn’t I give to see a production as thoughtful as this one moved into a smaller space, with modern flourishes and the stakes raised tenfold. If an up close Lion can’t be every bit as engaging as an episode of GOT, maybe it’s time to let this play — so beautifully preserved on film — fade away into history.