BOOK TALK by Deborah Savadge

Do yourself a favor and read the new Ann Patchett novel, Tom Lake, before Reese Witherspoon makes the mini-series with perhaps, if they haven’t aged out of it, Meryl Streep as retired actor Lara Kenison, and the three Gummer daughters as Lara’s children. The novel begins with community theatre auditions for Our Town and spends a lot of time in a cherry orchard. But the main backdrop is an upper Lower Michigan summer stock company, the Tom Lake of the title, which is producing Cabaret, Our Town, and Fool For Love in repertory.

If you know a lot about growing and harvesting cherries you will probably be thrilled to learn that Patchett has done her research. She tosses around words like “lugs,” “the Gator” and “brown rot, ” as if she had spent her life on a Northern Michigan cherry farm instead of writing novels, picture books, memoirs and book reviews and, more recently, owning a Nashville bookstore. Perhaps someone who has inside knowledge of farming will find errors in Tom Lake on the subject of farm maintenance or veterinary work, but to the lay person it seems as if Patchett knows her stuff when it comes to farming fruit.

Knowing, as all readers of Women in Theatre On Line Journal do, a fair amount about how theatre is made, you will be amused by some half dozen mistakes Patchett makes in depicting the world of summer stock. Certainly, there is a great deal of fun for professional theatre folk who pick up this page-turner. Not least is re-visiting the joy of rehearsals, performances and finding a theatre family.  But every once in awhile a “Whaaat?” moment takes us out of the novel and back to stock days and nights whether or not we, like the novel’s protagonist, have had a passionate showmance.

So here, for the WIT Journal record, are the minor, cherry-picked missteps in the otherwise completely satisfying, fictional world of Tom Lake.

Rehearsal Call

Have you ever been in a summer stock company that routinely started rehearsals at 9am? To civilians, it probably sounds like a reasonable hour for the beginning of a rehearsal day, but for Show People, 10 am, 10:30 or even 11 am is much more usual. Tom Lake rehearsals, we are told, all begin at 9 am.  Since the company is often in performance while rehearsing, the company will be in violation of the 12 Hours of Rest rule several times a week.

Casting

There would be nothing unreasonable about playing a small part in one show and a major role in another. Actors often come to stock in order to play a role they haven’t been able to land elsewhere. What actor wouldn’t be happy to play the inebriated actress, Gay Wellington, in You Can’t Take It With You, say, especially if she also got the chance to play Amanda in Private Lives? An actor might feel herself to be tremendously lucky to get to play Lady Bracknell in the same season in which she also plays the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. And yet in Tom Lake, members of the company consider the young actor named Pallas to be heroic for playing a Kit Kat girl in Cabaret, Emily in Our Town, and, once Cabaret has closed, May in Fool For Love. In fact, a sensible stock producer will cast actors in as many plays in a row as possible to save on transportation and housing.  The Tom Lake Artistic Director would surely cast actors in at least two of the three shows, and there would be nothing unusual about appearing in all three.  Musical theatre performers are usually delighted to take on a straight play. Sally Bowles and May probably makes more sensible casting than Emily Webb and May, but whoever plays Sally Bowles does not figure into the plot of Tom Lake.

BTW: Understudies in the 1980’s, would probably all be apprentices or interns. Unless there was a particular reason to fear for a specific actor’s health or stamina, not even the wealthiest stock company would hire an Equity actor to sit in on all rehearsals, watching an actor work and hoping for a chance to fill those shoes. The question of well-prepared understudies suits the Tom Lake plot, but stretches credulity. I can remember learning a major role while making my way from New York to the Midwest to go on that night. Oh, and Understudies in stock rarely have costumes made for them. Which brings us to…

Costumes

The costume designer-builder for the Tom Lake company would surely have lost her job if the costumes she built needed as many repairs as we learn about in Patchett’s novel.  Again, this suits the plot, but doesn’t seem plausible. After opening, the big jobs for Wardrobe are laundry and ironing.  But in Tom Lake, alterations, mending and repairs are a constant. Perhaps in something like Marat Sade, costumes might shred during mad scenes, but we are expected to believe that the Kit Kat girls dance decorations off their costumes nightly, and that the mending makes for a “jumble of clothes,” on a regular basis.

If you love reading contemporary novels by outstanding women writers, allow me to recommend the novels of Gish Jen and the novels and short stories of Lily King. I learned about these writers from reading an interview with Ann Patchett who also recommends Lyndsay Lynch’s debut novel about Hollywood, Do Tell.

Actors in Stock Do Their Own Make-Up

None of the three plays in the Tom Lake repertory requires any specialty make-up.  The idea that management has hired someone to apply eyelashes in summer stock is pretty preposterous – doubtless mistakenly taken from Hollywood. Any Kit Kat girl worth her salt can apply her own eyelashes and can wield a mascara wand without assistance.  There is no Cowardly Lion, Tinman or Witch in this trio of plays. No one in the Tom Lake company is the sort of movie star who might travel with her own make-up artist. The Director might ask the Costumer to help the actor playing the Emcee in Cabaret to design that character’s look, but other than that, Tom Lake actors would certainly be making up their own faces.

What the Audience Can Discern

A key plot point in Tom Lake involves (SPOILER ALERT) two people watching the opening night of Fool For Love and discovering during the opening moments of the performance that the two leads, who play characters who are hot for each other, are engaged in an all-consuming affair. Short of someone with amazing psychic powers, there is no way an audience member can glean whether their real-life partner is having a real-life affair with another cast member or is merely acting, just by watching them perform in a play. They might think, “Wow! My lover is so convincing in this role,” but could not credibly leap to the conclusion that they are having a real-life affair. It makes for a good scene in the book, but I hope the screenwriter will change that Reveal for the movie script because it discredits the art of acting and conflates what any good actor can depict with what that actor is experiencing when off stage. It would be a simple matter to have the screenplay show these two characters discovering their respective partners embracing offstage or in a break in rehearsal and realize their involvement rather than infer that the actors playing Eddie and May are having a steamy affair because their onstage selves are doing a good job generating heat.

Small Fish to Carp About in Tom Lake

It would be a huge scandal if actors were drinking alcohol through rehearsals of a play in which the characters are boozing. I have heard of actors drinking their way through a public reading of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but this is certainly not the way the non-alcoholic members of the company would want to prepare and perform, especially in a company that rehearses by day and performs at night. If it leaked out that this was going on, as it does in Tom Lake, surely management would weigh in.

Of less consequence: The Tom Lake company seems to have the luxury of multiple tech rehearsals. Really? This is summer stock. And let’s revisit that opening week schedule for Our Town.

But in the grand through line of Tom Lake, these quibbles are nothing more than the occasional cherry pit in a delicious pie.

Why Read Tom Lake?

Among my favorite novels are Patchett’s Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto and Dutch House. Like these, Tom Lake is un-put-downable. Unlike her ingenious saga, State of Wonder, this newest novel can be savored from beginning to end over a leisurely thirty-six hours. Characters in her novels surprise and fascinate; unexpected turns in her plots delight us without seeming illogical. 

The Boston Globe calls the book, “quietly devastating.” The New Yorker describes it as “elegiac,” “a fairy tale.” A cover sticker identifies Tom Lake as a selection of “Reese’s Book Club.” So, once the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes are behind us, we have the pleasure of anticipating Tom Lake, The Movie.

Deborah Savadge, a playwright and co-Editor of WIT Journal, is a veteran of many summer stock productions.