Every once in a while in an actor’s career you receive a gift. Sometimes it comes in the form of an audition from a casting director, or a role from a director. I was given one of the very best gifts ever offered to me from a dear friend, Colleen Kelly. Colleen was a colleague of mine at the University of Virginia’s Drama Department. She was a master teacher of movement and we had worked side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder for many years nurturing scores of graduate actors through a program we had designed together. In 2016 I announced my retirement after 30 plus years. At the time Colleen was also serving as the department chair and artistic director for the professional summer theater attached to the department called Heritage Theater Festival. One day Colleen called me into her office and said she had a play that she thought would be a good fit for my wife Jude and me. It was a two-hander entitled Chapatti by Christian O’Reilly.
The play is set in Dublin, Ireland. Two lonely seniors meet by chance. I was to play Dan whose best friend is his dog named Chapatti. He takes Chapatti on long walks that usually end up at the gravesite of his former wife. He meets Jude’s character, Betty, who happens to be a cat lover and has a
whole tribe of cats (nineteen!) running about her small cottage. The journey of the play is Betty’s efforts to convince Dan that love and romance can exist, in fact thrive, when you are in later life.
The second gift that Colleen gave Jude and me was to invite Doreen Bechtol to become our director. Doreen was an ideal artistic companion for us as we happily solved together the complexities of dealing with imaginary dogs and cats and a set that doubled both as Betty’s house and Dan’s small flat. Breakthroughs happened almost daily as Doreen gently guided us through backstory improvisations and let Jude and me discover the staging and physical behavior.
One of the true challenges for us was memorization. I’ve had the good fortune to have been cast in a number of two-handers in my career…but I was much younger with a much more agile brain. Months before the rehearsals were to begin, you would find Jude and me sitting in our living room every morning, sipping Irish tea, and going over lines. We arrived at the first rehearsal fully memorized. Another challenge for me was to make a clear distinction between Jude and her character, Betty. This is no mean feat. if you’ve spent a lifetime with your mate (40 years in 2016). Dan had only met Betty for a week. Jude made this challenge quite easy for me. At every rehearsal and every performance I would marvel how she would transform herself into a woman I did not know at all but desperately wanted to spend my whole life with.
Other equally important gifts arrived along the way. Our designers gave us a set, lights and costumes that offered us so much confidence and freedom.. A faculty colleague of mine, Michael Rasbury, sat in on our first table read and in a week returned with the most beautiful score that supported us through the entire play. It’s impossible to adequately describe in words how much Jude and I relied on, were inspired by, and actually floated on Michael’s melodies every performance.. You will hear a bit of his music as an underscoring to this post.
The life of our production didn’t end with the closing of our two-week run at Heritage Festival Theater. Jude contacted a dear friend and long time colleague, Chuck Tobin. Chuck is the artistic director of the St. Michael’s Playhouse in Burlington Vermont. Chuck liked what he saw and placed our production with a new director and design team in his 2018 summer season. Kathy Markey, our St Mike’s director, guided us to deeper insights into our characters. It was a fun challenge to adjust our ideas from the intimate black box experience at Heritage to the 400 seat proscenium space at the Playhouse.
Here’s a slide show that features photos from both productions with Michael Rasbury’s Irish laments to entertain you as you watch. Photos by Michael Bailey Photography.
