Jeffrey Albright, the director and a member of the board for The Village Players, saw Lettice and Lovage on Broadway starring its original vehicle, Dame Maggie Smith in the early 1990s. Since then, he has been enamored with the idea of producing the show and recently posed the idea to the other Village Player board members for their season. “I like the message of the play, I like what it says about living life with gusto rather than just being a spoke in the wheel,” Albright says, “It’s beautifully active, it’s funny, it’s touching, it’s something that you can bring anybody to.” The Village Players is presenting this comedy, originally written by renowned playwright Peter Shaffer for a London stage, the first three weekends of November.
The more things change
Lettice and Lovage is a comedy about history and architecture; “a real indictment of sort of a cookie cutter culture, everybody has to be the same and all the buildings have to look the same. If you look at older cities there’s a lot of interesting architecture and if you look at newer developments, everything is glass, concrete and steel and it really takes a shot at that,” explains Albright.
We meet the lead character Lettice Douffet “when she’s a tour guide at a very, very boring stately mansion in England and she ends up sort of revising history to make it more interesting and as a consequence she gets in trouble,” says Albright. Later in the play, the audience learns that, “her take on life is that there are too many people that settle for the ordinary,” explains Albright, “and too many people that just want to get by, rather than living life to its fullest by experiencing art and beauty and exciting things about history.”
A leading lady’s role
The play, which takes place in England in the late 1980s to early 90s, was written for Dame Maggie Smith to play the lead of Lettice Douffet. Albright wanted to cast this production with mature actors and believes he found the most elite actresses in the area who effectively fill and compliment Dame Maggie’s shoes. “Barbara Barkan, who plays Lettice in this play, was also in The Dinner Party, which was presented by the Players in January of 2013. When I was speaking with an interviewer about that play, and I was talking about the cast, when I spoke about Barbara I referred to her as the Maggie Smith of Toledo,” Albright says, “Maggie Smith is a force to be reckoned with onstage and on film and she’s one of those people you really can’t take your
eyes off of, she’s so interesting and Barbara is really that kind of actress.”
The rest of the cast includes Lotte Schoen as Cindy Bilby; Joe Capucini as Mr. Bardolph; Samanthia Rousos as Miss Framer and Bill Perry as Surly Man.
In a world of differences one has to be able to find the happy medium. “This play takes two people who are fully opposed to one another in the beginning and the audience watches their journey as they learn to listen to one another and to talk to one another civilly. They’re both changed when we leave them—it’s a valuable lesson of how people who disagree with one another can learn to communicate,” says Albright.
Lettice and Lovage will run Friday, November 1 through Saturday, November 16. 8pm.
The Village Players, 2740 Upton Ave.
419-472-6817. $14-$16, for tickets visit
thevillageplayers.org
