In Love With Theater

Teresa DeVito is an artist, a restaurateur, a mom and an experienced movie crew member, but she's never appeared on stage.

"I love acting so much," says the Eureka Springs resident. "It's just something I always wanted to do but never had the opportunity."

In "Love Letters," on stage this weekend, she's had the chance to learn from a pro. Joe Watts, who moved to the Ozarks in October, is appearing opposite DeVito in the script-in-hand performance Saturday evening, while Bryan Manire and Faith Pettit Shah will share the stage Sunday afternoon.

Watts was for many years a fixture of the Houston theater community, where in 1983 he started the first company dedicated to "gay programming." To him, that meant shows like "Angels in America" and "Boys in the Band," although the first production featured an all-male cast in Noel Coward's "Private Lives."

The reaction, he remembers, was "absolutely amazing. We were the darlings of the theater set in Houston."

Watts says he directed more than 60 productions in Houston then, in 2012, moved to Dallas to take care of a friend.

"I had heard about the gay migration to Eureka Springs," he says, but his attention was piqued by a multi-page spread in The Advocate, a U.S.-based national gay and lesbian news magazine. "I just snapped, said, 'That's it,'" he remembers. "I shocked a whole lot of people by moving here sight unseen.

"I had friends that questioned my sanity and rightly so, but I just knew I wanted to do it," Watts says. "And I didn't want to put any roadblocks in the way. I just wanted to start a new life."

Part of that new incarnation was a new theater company, OZ-arks Drama Club -- but it hasn't been as easy as he envisioned.

"Some things here have been disappointing to me," he says, "the main disappointment being trying to find actors. There aren't a lot of them in Eureka Springs."

He held auditions at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

"On Saturday, I got one female; on Sunday, I got three females. That was it," he recalls. "And the women were pushing 60 or over 60. And the strange thing they said was, 'We'd love to do theater with you, but we don't know if we can memorize lines.' And I thought, 'Holy hell, I got old people, and I got no memory. So what do I do?'"

But a lightbulb went off in Watts' head. A.R. Gurney's "Love Letters," a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1988 and a smash Broadway revival in 2014, seemed perfect. It is the story of a 50-year correspondence between Melissa and her childhood-friend-turned-love-interest, Andrew, and it is presented script-in-hand as the characters read their letters. The first celebrity pair in the new revival was Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy.

"[Love Letters] is an extraordinary piece," Dennehy told Today. "You cannot stage a play more simply than this, and yet it's about everything in life. First love, loss of opportunities, loss of life, loss of love. ... It's a beautiful play, and all you do is speak it."

Watts found a home for the show at Main Stage Creative Community Center, which DeVito says has been remodeled and is "very nice." It's also intimate, seating just 125 at capacity.

So Watts is feeling pretty good about this production, he says. But when asked what he hopes the company grows up to be, he says, "the main thing is 'can it grow up to be?'."

Watts says he hopes to hold auditions in other area communities to bring actors to Eureka Springs for his next endeavor, a 10-minute play festival which he intends to model after a festival in Houston. He's got five scripts promised already, he says, thanks to a relationship with the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, and he will solicit more from a 50-mile radius through March 25 at [email protected].

"I've got a lot of ideas out there," he says. "But what has to happen in Eureka is you sort of have to prove yourself."

NAN What's Up on 02/20/2015