"Love Letters" at the Bergen County Players

Stars return to Bergen County Players for benefit performance
Monday, May 12, 2008Last updated: Monday May 12, 2008, EDT 7:59 AM
BY EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER
When she stepped into rehearsal for Disney's Broadway musical "Beauty and the Beast" in 1993, original cast member Beth Fowler already had a fan: the director, Robert Jess Roth. Both Fowler and Roth were former members of the Bergen County Players, and he told her that he'd always admired her work.

"Oh God," she recalled thinking to herself. "He's impressed."

Fowler has been a legend at the community theater organization since she made the leap into professional theater. The New Milford resident was a 29-year-old school teacher when she got a role in the musical "Gantry" in 1970. When she began work with Roth, she was already a Tony nominee for her role of Mrs. Lovett in 1989's "Sweeney Todd."

But Fowler, who was cast as Mrs. Potts in "Beauty and the Beast," was not looking for a fan.
"I said, 'Get over it Rob,' " Fowler recalled. " 'This is show business. Don't be afraid to tell me what to do.' "

"And he wasn't," she added with satisfaction. Roth, then a first-time Broadway musical director, kept his cool, even though the production budget was dizzyingly large at $10 million.

Roth will once again be directing Fowler and another local thespian legend, Philip Bosco, in the Bergen County Players' benefit performance of "Love Letters," by A.R. Gurney. The one-night-only performance, which also commemorates the Players' 75th anniversary season, takes place Sunday.

"I, for one, am very much looking forward to hearing Philip Bosco's voice reading these lines on stage," said Fowler, who has never worked with Bosco, a Haworth resident. "His is one of my favorite voices in the English language, and I will be very gratified to feel his voice in my body — because you do feel that on stage as an actor."

Their collaboration will be startlingly brief: The director and the two actors will get together to rehearse — at the earliest — the day before the performance. The play is structured as a series of letters between two people, crossing decades of their lives, and the actors are forbidden from memorizing a single line.

"The impact should be that [the actor is] reading this for the first time," said Bosco, who performed the two-person play when it was off-Broadway in 1989. "...It should have an unforced look, of a letter being read out loud. That was [Gurney's] only note to us."

The two actors sit across from each other on stage at a desk but consciously avert their eyes from each other for almost the entire length of the play, Bosco said. At the very end, when the woman has died and the man reads the last letter, she is allowed to look straight at him, but he is instructed not to reciprocate.

"It's a beautiful relationship that's funny and sad," said Roth. "They don't connect all the way through their lives — but you feel that maybe they should."

Roth says he is excited to be working with Fowler and Bosco in his old stomping ground. At age 12 and in the sixth grade, Roth became one of the Bergen County Players' youngest members in 1976. He still remembers the life-changing experience of playing Hughie in the play "Finishing Touches," by Jean Kerr.

"I had the first line of the play, as I recall," said Roth, who grew up in River Edge. "I remember you could hear the audience through the curtain, and you could see the houselights go down underneath it. There was this adrenaline rush, this excitement."

Roth continued with the Players, doing everything from the lights to assistant directing, for the next six years. He thinks of his experiences there as the most formative force in his childhood, other than his parents.

"The mechanics of creating a show are the same," he said, comparing the Players' productions with his work on Broadway. "It's just a lot more money involved, so there's more of an element of risk on Broadway... That's actually been comforting for me at times when it gets stressful: it's just the same thing, just a larger scale."

*
"Love Letters" will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Little Firehouse Theatre, 298 Kinderkamack Road, Oradell. Tickets $75. 201-261-4200 or bcplayers.org.
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com