Lettice & Lovage: director's comments
Without danger, Mr Bardolph, there is no theatre!
(Lettice Douffet to her court-appointed lawyer in Act 3)
Town & Gown Players opened its 50th Mainstage season with Peter Shaffer's dangerous comedy, which played Sept. 13-22, 2002. You are now looking at a little retrospective with some comments from the director. If pictures is what you came for, click here to return to the index page.
As dramaturg, Fran did a terrific amount of research on hard words, geography and so forth. Click here to learn what she found out.
I confess I had no idea how difficult this show would prove. Difficult for my lead actresses because their parts are immensely long and call for great stamina. Difficult for the crew because our set design included two ponderous units that had to be shifted twice an evening. Difficult for the "Visitors" because of the patience and restraint they had to exercise. And difficult for me because my assistant director had an on-the-job accident early in rehearsals and had to leave the show. (He mended, but he had many weeks when he could not even leave his apartment.)
It often happens in community theater that people just give and give. Whatever you ask them to do, they find time and energy to do it. This production was one of the good instances. Demand weeks of rehearsal from folks who will have only a few moments on stage, and they arrive cheerfully. Assign cast members to perform crew jobs, and they just fall in. Get behind in set construction, and somebody (Andy in this case) makes extra hours to catch you up. As a result, we got everything done and done right. But it was still a hard show.
Our audiences loved it, though. They enjoyed the dialog, the antics of the Visitors, the look, the movement.
I unfortunately will not have a chance to direct again for a couple of years. That will leave time to rest up from this one, absorb a number of lessons, and get pumped about some other script. I wish precisely the same to all my cast and crew members!
Fran organized a "First Matinee" discussion event following the Sept. 15 matinee performance. Professor C.B. Davis, who directed the University Theater production of Amadeus last season, gave a presentation and then I joined him in answering questions from a small but alert audience. (To view some stuff I prepared in advance of the First Matinee, click here.
The action of Lettice & Lovage takes place in three interiors. The cast includes two big roles, two supporting ones, and a few extras (Surly Man, Woman with Baby, Visitors, Disembodied Legs). A world of props appear, including Felina, Queen of Sorrows (Lettice's cat), and Baby. Lighting and sound requirements are simple. If it weren't for Lettice's over-the-top taste, costumes would be simple too. Stage directions point to a large and detailed set; the effects were within Town & Gown's scope even if the original means were not.
It's important that the two big roles of Lettice and her counterpart Lotte Schoen are women no longer of student age. Stage directions describe Lettice as "in middle life" and Lotte as "middle-aged." Lettice, daughter of the renowned Alice Evans Douffet, grew up watching her mother manage a Shakespearean company in the south of France and play all the best parts, from Richard III to Falstaff; she has furnished her apartment with salvaged props and her wardrobe with fantastic garments. You might mistake Lettice for something she isn't, a bag lady, say, but she has managed to stay in-touch enough to get by, almost, in present-day London. Lotte's father published sumptuous art books; she trained as an architect and now supervises tour guides in historic English houses. The two women find common ground in that they can't settle for "the Mere"; Lotte has a terrorist interlude in her past and Lettice improves dull history in order to "Enlarge—Enliven—Enlighten!" her tour audiences.
Possibly loose ends:
- Peter Shaffer also wrote Equus, Five Finger Exercise (which Town & Gown put up in 1969-70) and Amadeus (a 1994-95 Second Stage offering).
- My credits for Town & Gown include Arsenic and Old Lace (assistant director), Cyrano de Bergerac and The Play's the Thing (director), and many many technical and design jobs. Click here to see a fuller list of my credits.
- Lovage is not a character but an herb that Lettice uses in brewing her sixteenth-century cordial. (The name Lettice derives from the Latin name Laetitia, meaning "glad." Lettuce, in contrast, she describes as "one of God's mistakes.")
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