Parents’ courtship correspondence inspires playwright

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This article was published 23/08/2021 (1508 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Playwright Ken Ludwig’s latest play, Dear Jack, Dear Louise, premièred late in 2019, just three months before COVID-19 shut down most theatrical productions around the world.

Call it a matter of kismet that Ludwig’s play proved to be an almost perfect production for pandemic times. It is a two-hander, for starters, meaning it does not require lots of actors breathing all over the stage at the same time. And because it denotes a letter-writing relationship, even the actors are not required to be physically close.

Ludwig, in a phone interview from his home in Washington, D.C., acknowledges most of the comedies he writes, including hits such as Lend Me a Tenor, Crazy for You and Moon Over Buffalo, average out to about eight actors apiece.

“People are surprised that I wrote it before there was any such thing as COVID-19,” the 70-something Ludwig says. “And I don’t usually write two-handers either. I really usually write muscular comedies with a full cast.”

Ludwig doesn’t necessarily write personal plays either. The Pennsylvania-born playwright specializes in farce, but also adaptations of popular established works such as Murder on the Orient Express, The Three Musketeers and Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery.

Dear Jack, Dear Louise is more near and dear to his heart, the story of a courtship by mail during the Second World War between U.S. army Capt.Jack Ludwig, a military doctor stationed in Oregon, and Louise Rabiner, an aspiring actress and dancer in New York City — Ludwig’s own parents.

“It’s mostly non-fiction,” Ludwig says, adding that his parents really did carry out a long correspondence by mail before they met. Unfortunately, Ludwig was not able to use the real letters as a resource.

“I had to make all the letters up,” he says. “I know there were letters from my mother. She told me that before she passed away.

“Just like Cassandra Austen destroyed all of Jane Austen’s letters, my mom got rid of the letters before she died,” Ludwig says. “I guess it’s because she felt that they must have been intimate in a way that she didn’t want her kids to see.

“But we know they existed and in fact this is all true,” Ludwig says. “I just had to make up the actual letters from scratch.”

Ludwig still places the play firmly in his genre wheelhouse.

“It’s a romantic comedy, there’s no question about it,” he says. “You don’t know quite how it’s going to end, and there are lots of surprises.

The playwright says it’s a more serious work than his usual fare. “But I was involved in the première production and I directed some readings of it before that. It gets a lot of laughs.”

The fact this production comes courtesy of Winnipeg Jewish Theatre does not mean Jewishness plays strongly in the play’s themes.

“It never came up in my work one way or the other,” Ludwig says, adding that it does come out in subtle ways in the context of the play.

“There’s a sensibility about it that’s Jewish, because they were both Jewish, not deeply religiously so by any stretch of the imagination,” Ludwig says.

Even if the subject never comes up, Ludwig considers his own humour to have been inspired by the Jewish humourists who came before him. “I’m a huge Woody Allen fan. I think it’s the greatest comic writer of my lifetime,” Ludwig says. “I’m a huge fan of Alan King and Buddy Hackett and all those wonderful storytellers.

“They all have the same voice,” he says. “That voice is one of honesty and being able to see the humour in life. I just love that.”

Dear Jack, Dear Louise will be performed in an open-sided canvas tent on the Asper Jewish Community Campus field with socially distanced reserved seating. The play is approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing