Recently, the Marion Art Center staged a production of A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters.” Just thinking about that play brings back many memories. Mostly bad. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Love Letters” is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated, two-person play about Andrew and Melissa, who have exchanged letters for over 50 years. While they have lived separate lives with other mates, their love for each other is the unsaid thread that binds them until it is too late to express it aloud.
The missus and I, along with some others, had formed a community theater, and the play was one of our first productions. We had no budget, so it was a perfect choice to begin our adventure in the theater. It is known as a “staged reading” … no sets, no costumes and the actors, seated at a table, read from the script.
We performed it under less-than-ideal conditions. The “theater” was the meeting hall of the local VFW situated above the post’s bar. The ambient noise was not exactly conducive to a tender, wistful love story.
For reasons I still can’t fathom, the director cast me as the privileged New England WASP Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. Melissa Gardner was played by an appropriately WASPish woman who had recently moved to our town who fancied herself the second coming of Sarah Bernhardt and saw me as somewhere between Peewee Herman – May he rest in peace – and Sylvester Stallone. Despite the title of the play, there was no love lost between us two thespians.
Thanks to the brilliant work of the director, we pulled off the illusion of an unfulfilled, loving relationship perfectly. Well, perfectly may be too strong a description, but that’s why it’s called acting. Did I mention the director was my wife?
Had I been born much earlier, my foray into “treading the boards” might have happened right here in Mattapoisett. Our town was once a hotbed of legitimate theater.
I can recall as a boy attending plays in the upper town hall where there once was an auditorium. Musicals, concerts, minstrel shows, graduations and town meetings … which were often a source of entertainment in their own right … were all held there. Alas, we no longer have a venue suited to any theatricals. In the late 1800s, Mattapoisett did have a theater. It was located on Water Street in a former boathouse on the wharf at the foot of Mechanic Street.
E.V. Bird, a summer resident, operated The Ways, an 80-seat venue named for the ways boats were hauled out of the water. The building had a large stage and housed dressing rooms and a place for painting sets that Mr. Bird built himself. In addition, he had a storehouse for props, furniture, scenery, and all things a theater needed for a performance.
According to “Old Mattapoisett Tales,” a 1970 publication of the Woman’s Club, townsfolk enjoyed the performances, particularly at Thursday dress rehearsals, which were free. Tickets were required for weekend audiences who came from miles around. “Local talent” played the women’s roles, while men actors came from acting societies in Boston and New York.
After its halcyon days as a theater, the building was moved across the street where it was converted into a residence and moved to the lot that once held the Mattapoisett House Hotel. It was moved again closer to the street and became the former Mattapoisett Inn Bread and Breakfast.
Incidentally, one of the first productions at The Ways was “Old Love Letters.” How about that! I’ll bet my Sarah Bernhardt-wannabe costar would have loved to perform in that play, perhaps opposite Sylvester Stallone.
Editor’s note: Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and retired newspaper columnist whose musings are, after some years, back in The Wanderer under the subtitle “Thoughts on ….” Morgado’s opinions have also appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.