Every Monday throught Friday, Charles Keating and Victoria Wyndham play to the cameras at the Brooklyn studio where the soap opera "Another World" is put together. Recently, the actors have also been playing to live audiences in "Couplets," a recital or chamber piece as Keating describes it, consisting of poetry, dramatic scenes, letters and songs--all about love.
The pair developed "Couplets," as an offshoot of their roles in "Another World," and about once a month, they now hop a plane to do a live performance and meet fans in a town where an NBC affiliate airs their television show.
On July 15 and 16, Wyndham and Keating, residents of Bedford, N.Y., and Weston, respectively, will bring "Couplets" to their own backyard with three performances for the Stamford-based Rainbow Theatre at the Rich Forum
. The pair premiered their theatrical effort in April at New York's Symphony Space Theatre. From an artistic perspective, performing "Couplets" gives the actors a chance to "get out on the boards" in a theater setting, as Wyndham puts it, without memorizing lines, dealing with sets or needing a large production team. From a commercial perspective, it allows them to interact with their soap opera audience at a time when this genre is fighting for viewers.
"We're doing it to get out there and see and meet them ('Another World' fans), and to see what they like about the show and don't like about the show," Wyndham says, "and to get them to support the theater." Keating and Wyndham are donating their services to allow local theater companies to benefit from their performances of "Couplets."
For the Connecticut resident Keating, a British native whose resume includes work on Broadway and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and with such illustrious countrymen as Laurence Olivier, "Couplets" is a way of getting back to his roots in the theater and performing the work of "some of the finest writers who ever writ," he says. "When you go into the theater to do Shakespeare, you are in the service of the poet's imagination," he notes. By contrast, the soap opera is more character-driven.
The idea for "Couplets" began with the budding romance between Keating and Wyndham's "Another World" characters, Carl Hutchins and Rachel Cory. The writers had them court using the words of poets such as Shelley, Keats, Dylan Thomas and e.e.cummings in love letters to each other.
The volume of fan mail Wyndham and Keating recieved in response to these exchanges convinced them to offer more to their audience. They had been performing A.R.Gurney's two-person play "Love Letters" but decided to come up with something of their own. It took six months to choose the works they wanted to use.
"It ranges all over the world through the centuries," Wyndham says of "Couplets." "Ther's something for everyone." Keating describes the material as "moving from a 12th-century young girl in a convent to a Japanese courtesan."
Although NBC and some sponsors were unsure whether their viewing audience would enjoy a live performance of what could be called "highbrow" material, she says, fans have greeted "Couplets" enthusiastically in Tennessee, Virginia and Rhode Island. They will soon bring the piece to Missouri, Washington, Georgia, Florida and Texas. They are booked into next year, Wyndham notes
. "In typical fashion, the network and sponsors, they always underestimate the audience--they always think they're simpler and stupider than they are," Wyndham says. "They (audiences) are very sophisticated. It just depends on how you do it. They won't accept it if it isn't well done."