INTERVIEW: Director Stephen Nachamie has a letter for you
Photo: Penguin Rep Theatre’s new production of Dear Jack, Dear Louise stars Alexandra Fortin (Louise) and Michael Liebhauser (Jack). Photo courtesy of Dorice Arden Madronero / Provided by Penguin Rep with permission.
Director Stephen Nachamie, a veteran of the New York theater scene, is at the helm of a new production of Ken Ludwig’s epistolary play Dear Jack, Dear Louise, which played earlier this summer at Shadowlands Stages in Upstate New York and is currently running at the Penguin Rep Theatre in Stony Point, New York. Performances continue through Aug. 18.
In the show, Ludwig brings to life letters that his real-life parents sent back and forth during World War II. Their relationship was developed through touching, powerful words; they hadn’t even met in person yet. The play depicts Jack (Michael Liebhauser), a military doctor stationed in Oregon, and Louise (Alexandra Fortin), an actor in New York, and how their relationship takes off and is tested over these loving epistles, according to press notes.
“I’ve known Ken Ludwig’s work for a while,” Nachamie said in a recent phone interview. “And Shadowlands Stages in Ellenville, New York, and Penguin were entering into this co-production, and [artistic director] Joe Brancato had called me saying, ‘Hey, we’re considering this. I want you to read the script.’ They sent it to me from Shadowlands, and it’s interesting.”
The interest that Nachamie found in the script is mainly because of its unique nature as a set of letters to be performed on stage. The director was also able to make a connection between this courting of Jack and Louise and the relationships in his own family.
“My dad’s family is an entire medical family from Brooklyn,” he said. “My grandmother and my grandfather on my mother’s side, while not into the arts professionally, they were supporters and did a lot with support for the war. Both my grandfathers were in the Army during World War II. My father’s father was a doctor stationed in India during World War II, and my mother’s father was an attorney stationed at Fort Totten in Queens. … Reading it, I started to get to know these people. I fell in love with the play.”
The rehearsals between Nachamie and the two cast members centered on how Ludwig structured the piece. The director said the play is essentially part letter, part monologue and part scene work. This caused them all to work differently and listen harder.
“It is a conversation, but you’re taking in a lot more,” he said of the show. “What the play does is it starts as single letters, and then it kind of blends into as if they’re having a conversation responding to the letters. But they never actually get to see each other until they meet, so the tricky thing with the letters, they’re very full of emotion, they’re very full of the spirit of these people, the souls of these people. So it’s not exactly like reading a sermon or something like that, but it was about filling all of that in and lining up what they wanted the other person to know and feel, the steps of trust of getting to know them and also keeping in mind the response and where they are in the relationship and how close they are to meeting.”
Nachamie said they focused on the dreams, wishes and vulnerabilities of each character, and this led them to appreciate how the two could fall in love from a long distance away. “It was a lot of constructing everything that’s unsaid to get to the said,” he said. “It all came from his letters that are in the script. It wasn’t like we created something that wasn’t already there.”
The director added: “The first leg of this co-production of the show was at Shadowlands Stages up in Ellenville, New York, and there we sort of tackled this together. [The two actors] both have such unique and extraordinary personalities, and in making these characters, the moments inform themselves by how these actors brought themselves to it, if that makes sense. The collaboration was great because … they found things in the quirks and in constructing the inner-lives of these characters that all come from the text. It’s all believable, but we found that basically only these two actors could play these characters this way, if that makes sense. It’s so unique to them.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Dear Jack, Dear Louise, directed by Stephen Nachamie, continues through Aug. 18 at the Penguin Rep Theatre in Stony Point, New York. Click here for more information and tickets.
