St. Louis Actors' Studio to Present SAM AND LAURA

Before the official October opening of its 2010-11 season, St. Louis Actors' Studio will present an original two-act play, Sam and Laura, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning and Emmy Award-winning writer and critic, Ron Powers.

The play will be presented on two consecutive evenings at 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday Sept. 3 and 4, at Actors' Studio's Gaslight Theater, 358 N. Boyle Ave., in the city's CentrAl West End. Tickets can be purchased now by calling the theater at (314) 458-2978. Friday nights performance will be a benefit for the Actors' Studio and will include a reception with Mr. Powers. Tickets for Friday night are $75, $25 for Saturday night.

The play was written by Powers, author of the critically acclaimed biography, Mark Twain: A Life, to celebrate a special constellation of anniversaries in the legacy of America's best-known writer, Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain: The centennial year of his death in 1910, the 175th anniversary of his birth (Nov. 30, 1835) and the 125th anniversary of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, considered by many his greatest novel and perhaps the greatest in American literature.

 

 

Sam and Laura is based on a true romantic encounter between young Sam Clemens and a mesmerizing young girl named Laura Wright in 1858.

 

 

The encounter fueled a lifelong recurring dream for Clemens and infused Mark Twain's literature: Scholars believe that Laura Wright, "the young girl in the unfaded bloom of her youth, with her plaited tails dangling from her young head and her white frock puffing about in the wind of that ancient Mississippi time," as the author later described her, was the true inspiration for Becky Thatcher and several other women characters in his work.

The play opens on Laura's 80th birthday, which she is celebrating in a Hollywood nightclub in 1925, in the company of her young escort, C. O. Byrd, a friend of Laura's family back in Warsaw, MO. Sam has been dead for 15 years. Still spry and spirited, Laura discloses the facts of her brief romance with Sam as Byrd listens, entranced. (Younger actors representing the youthful Laura and Sam enact the details of Laura's reminiscences.) Laura tells Byrd that she has been the subject of a lifelong recurring dream of Mark Twain's, and hints that she may have somehow actively participated in this dream. At the end of a long and emotional Champagne-fueled evening, Byrd escorts Laura home to her shabby Hollywood apartment where she makes a stunning revelation:

She opens a trunk in the corner of her room and pulls out handfuls of letters that Sam had written her over the years, "for her eyes only" and unsuspected by the world (again, this is historical fact). Laura wants the letters destroyed before her death but she cannot bring herself to light the match.

Laura extracts a promise from Byrd regarding the letters and the play ends with a dramatic scene that unites Laura, Byrd, Sam Clemens, dreams, reality, the past and the present in a way that Mark Twain (who obsessively believed that dreams were "real") would well appreciate.

This is Ron Powers's first play. A former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, he is the author or co-author of fourteen books, including four about Mark Twain or his hometown of Hannibal. Powers collaborated in two New York Times No. 1 bestsellers: Flags of Our Fathers, with James Bradley, and True Compass, the memoir of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, in 2009.

Why the strong fascination with Mark Twain? Powers himself was born in Hannibal, in 1941. The man he felt to be his kindred spirit had been dead since 1910. But, as he grew up in Mark Twain's hometown, graduating from Hannibal High School in 1959, Powers's teachers and friends felt that he had "Twain's sense of humor and writing ability." Ron felt the connection and was enthralled by it, says a friend who knew Powers as a young man.

According to PBS series producer, Ken Burns, Powers seemed to reach back to his kindred spirit. He "gets to the center of Twain's life, humor, tragedy and outrage."

And HAl Holbrook, actor and star of "Mark Twain Tonight" says, "Ron Powers seems to penetrate the space where Mark Twain lived and is walking just behind him, day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour. His eye cocked for truth, he plunges into the interior of the human being behind the Mark Twain trademark: the boy, the man, the mythic American."

Powers lives and works in Castleton, VT, where he is Writer in Residence at Castleton College. His wife, Honoree Fleming, is Dean of Education at the college. The two have a son, Dean, a political organizer in New Mexico and Maine.