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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Friends share lives in ‘Letters’

Director wants unrehearsed feel

Actors Phil West and Judy Gross rehearse a scene from the StageWest Community Theatre’s production of

Two actors sitting at separate desks reading letters from over the years is the focus of the new play presented by StageWest Community Theatre.

“Love Letters” by A.R. Gurney features Phil West as Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Judy Gross plays Melissa Gardner, two old friends who keep in touch with each other through many letters written throughout a 30-year period. The two read their letters to each other during the play while their lives play out in the viewers’ imagination.

“It’s very engrossing,” said director Charles Kenfield.

Kenfield said the author of the play specified the actors not rehearse too much or even memorize their lines so the audience will get the illusion of the characters reading the letter for the first time.

“This is a very new experience for these two actors,” Kenfield said before one of two rehearsals for the play. During rehearsals he often stops the actors to talk about the way they are sitting or reading a line, to make sure the form of the play doesn’t get monotonous for the audience.

“I’m a very interactive director,” he said.

StageWest has been around Cheney for a while, performing three or four plays a year. They choose the plays from a catalog and pick plays featuring three or fewer characters.

They most recently performed “Love Rides the Rails” and “The Laramie Project.”

The group has done dinner theater in the past, but food costs are getting somewhat prohibitive, so for “Love Letters,” there will be cake, tea and coffee during intermission.

It still takes a crew of people to present a play with a small cast and limited scenery. The house crew has to make sure the sets are in place, sell tickets and pass out refreshments. Everyone involved is a volunteer.

“We manage to get things on the boards,” Kenfield said.

For “The Laramie Project,” it took many more volunteers, with a cast of about 12 with interchanging parts. The troupe rehearsed for about three months, four days a week.

West, who said he didn’t even look at the second half of the play before the rehearsal, has been acting for about eight years after he brought his children to a children’s theater in Elbe, Wash., to get involved in a play. The director talked him into playing the part of Scrooge.

“I loved everything about it,” West said.

A computer programmer by day, West, who lives in Spokane Valley, has performed with StageWest and with Life Center Church.

Gross has been performing on and off since she was in high school. She got involved in a community theater when she lived in Ritzville and when she moved to Medical Lake she began performing with StageWest.

Gross is a dispatcher in the transportation department of Medical Lake School District. “Love Letters” is the fifth play she’s performed with StageWest.

“It’s kind of like being on drugs when you are on stage,” she said.

In “Love Letters,” Melissa Gardner is a rich and spoiled socialite artist who struggles through alcoholism, divorce and mental illness. Andrew Makepeace Ladd III joins the Navy, attends Yale, becomes a lawyer and eventually a U.S. senator.

During the play, neither of the actors look at each other, nor even acknowledge the presence of the other, since the idea is they are writing the letters from far away from each other. They do, however, react to what their friend is writing to them.

StageWest plans to stage “Bell, Book and Candle” in October, and next year a new version of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Contact staff writer Lisa Leinberger at (509) 459-5449 or by e-mail at lisal@spokesman.com.