Shaker Bridge Theatre, the independent communal theater company operating out of the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction, has returned with the second show of its season — “Dear Jack, Dear Louise.” Following on the heels of a thought-provoking performance of “Eureka Day,” Bill Coons, director and founder of Shaker Bridge Theatre, has now turned to history, to the power of an epistolary story, to bring to life the letters of Jack Ludwig and Louise Rabiner, two real people who fell in love through handwritten correspondence during WWII. The play is in its closing performances this weekend.
The curtain opens to a boisterous and precocious Louise, living in a small flat in New York City with dreams of one day becoming a Broadway sensation. Across from her on stage, in a small, sparse bedroom, is Jack, a doctor drafted into the war as a medic to help those fighting on the front lines. Never looking at each other, never leaving the perimeter of their respective rooms, these two characters slowly embark on a life-changing love affair.
“I wanted the next play we did to be a story I could fall into and obsessively live in for months,” Coons began, “I stumbled upon ‘Dear Jack, Dear Louise,’ and became fixated on the challenges of staging an epistolary story, of finding a way to craft intimacy and love through only the word.”
To tackle some of these challenges, Coons allowed his two lead actors — Tommy Crawford and Allie Seibold — to read the script to each other only once. “We had them go through the entire script facing each other,” Coons told the Standard. “When I took that away from them, they had this imprint, this memory, or even a fantasy of what the other was doing, how the other was reacting to their words, and that in turn created this very real vulnerability and unsureness that accompanies letter-writing. Their dynamic, their relationship rings true.”
“Dear Jack, Dear Louise” will be at the Briggs Opera House for one more weekend before its final bow on Dec. 21. Tickets and more information can be found at shakerbridgetheatre.org.
For more on this, please see our Dec. 18 edition of the Vermont Standard.
