VWCK Interview: Soap Opera Weekly 1995
Rhyme And Reason
By Lara De Losh
THE ON-SCREEN CHEMISTRY translates just as well offscreen for Another World's Victoria Wyndham and Charles Keating (Rachel and Carl), and beginning with a Feb. 11 performance at the Fleetwood Stage Company at Mt. Vernon, N.Y., the duo will be travelling across the United States and Canada performing once a month in Couplets, a celebration of love in prose, poetry and lyrics, benefiting regional and collegiate theaters.
Wyndham says the show is the product of the success of A. R. Gurney's Love Letters (which they recently performed) and "the great groundswell of response from the fans watching the storyline when Carl was attempting woo Rachel through poetry and literature. They would send us letters pointing out their favorite poets, favorite poems, or poems they had written. When we saw the response, Charles suggested that maybe this was worth doing as a show. And since they were so wonderful in sharing their favorite literature with us, we, in an effort to respond to that, wanted to share some of Charles' and Vicky's favorite literature. We just took it from there."
"There also seems to be a hunger these days for what we were all weaned on, which is 'Once upon a time there were three bears,'" says Keating. Adds Wyndham, "We discovered how popular the spoken-word clubs have become, both in L.A. and in New York City. By performing Love Letters, which is nothing but read material, we discovered that people really have been inundated with the moving image to such an extent that they find something magicial about sitting and listening."
The format of Couplets "is a cozy, storytelling atmosphere, which will run for 90 minutes, please god,"says Keating. "It percolated with much laughter and a few surprises. The material jumps cultures and periods, moving from a 12th-century young girl in a convent to a Japanese courtesan to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew." Along with Shakespeare, the piece highlights the writings of Noel Coward, Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats, Dorothy Parker and others, "Voices from various times and periods that will hopefully feed into this idea of couples, relationships, man/woman --obviously -- man/man, child/woman, mother/child, and so forth," he says. "The vast problem, of course, is that there's so much material to sift through, to come up with the pieces that seem to thread together."
In addition to the amount of material they had to go through, each actor had pencil sketches of what they visualized in the piece. "But we've stayed pretty open to each other's suggestions and respect each other's thought process," Wyndham says. "since we began [researching], the format has already gone through many changes, and it will certainly go through many more because it's a work in progress. It's like writing a play -- you are shaping a show and you don't know what's going to work until you fiddle with it for a while."
"The ultimate knowledge, though," Keating adds, "is when you put it up on its feet in front of people and see how it is recieved."
What sounds good doesn't always "stand well next to other material that needs to be done, so the gleaning process is very arduous," says Wyndham. "We've been working on this for a couple of monthes now, and we're still moving things around and moving things out. A lot of stuff we simply adored and had picked right away to perform has been taken out. The wonderful thing about doing a piece like this is that it stays fresh, because when we get tired of doing one thing, we can put something else in. So probably no two audiences will see the same show."
Couplets' scenic design is in the same vein as Love Letters, "but just in terms of the focus on relationships and the simplicity of the set," Wyndham says. "We will be on a carpet, a few cushions, maybe a little music playing in the background and us. That's the only way we can travel with this piece. We are only able to do the piece on the weekends when we're off, and then we have to travel to wherever, so you have to travel light -- just the two of us and our scripts. That also makes it easier for the theaters, because all they have to really prepare for is the lighting."
Since each performance will benefit a local theater and theater group, ease of travel wasn't the only reason for the simplistic set. "Productions where you have $20 million to spend are wonderful, but the point is that due to the politics of our times, theater and theater groups have lost all their funding," she continues. "Yet, people still hunger to go to the theater. So our secondary thought was to develop a show we could do that would be as practical for a theater as Love Letters, that would not only give people a nice evening of theater but would also benefit regional theaters and university theater departments by giving the show to them free, so that they can raise money for their own seasons. And that has been gratefully recieved by the theaters."
Wyndham and Keating have researched so much material, "that we have enough for at least three different shows," Wyndham laughs. "We've had to take out quite a few bawdy bits, which we think are hysterical but we felt were a little too much for this show." However, those bawdy bits, Keating says, "fired us up with the idea for another show...it's just called Sex."
Tickets for Couplets at the Fleetwood Stage Company and a post-performance reception with the actors are $40; $75 for the dinner party before, performance and reception. For more information about the production, call (914) 699-6449. Check future Schedule of Events listings for additional performances of Couplets.
Soap Opera Weekly
1995
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