Theater Group Lets Readers Rest Eyes

Seated on folding chairs in the literature section of Upchurch-Brown Booksellers in Laguna Beach, the 40 book lovers had turned out on a warm Saturday evening for an unusual reading experience: To listen to, rather than read, the written word.

They were there for the latest installment of “Readers Theater: Hot Off the Shelves.”

Perched on an antique bench next to an open Dutch door, director Steve Mellow explained that the theme of the evening’s program was, “When we grow up.” The material, he said, would be about growing up and discovering things about life and about oneself.

But first Mellow had a question for the mostly middle-aged audience: What is the first book they remember seeing?

After a slight pause, one man grinned: “Dick and Jane.”

“Mother Goose,” offered a woman.

“Peter Rabbit,” said another man.

Mellow ended the brief memory exercise by recalling the first book that came into his hands. It was a copy of “Mother Goose” when he was about 2 years old and, he said, it had honey on the cover.

“So my memory of my first book was one of sweetness,” he said. “Of course, one of the first books I remember being presented with was the Bible.”

With that, Mellow nodded to the blonde standing on the loft overlooking the gathering and, in a lilting English accent, British-born Valerie McIlroy began reading from the Bible: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. . . . “

Then, with barely a pause, the woman seated next to Mellow, Barbara Manalis, began reading from another book: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. . . . “

And so it went: from Corinthians 13 in the Bible to the opening passage of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

Before the 50-minute program was over, the four readers--all volunteers from the community--had read selections from a dozen books ranging from Pat Conroy’s “Prince of Tides” to Ogden Nash’s poem, “The Seven Spiritual Ages of Mrs. Marmaduke Moore,” and from Moss Hart’s autobiography, “Act One,” to Nora Ephron’s short-story collection, “Crazy Salad.” And, with a taped jazz accompaniment, Mellow read a portion of his play-in-progress, “Jazz Quartet.”

Despite having to compete with the occasional blare of a car radio outside, the bookstore’s second Readers Theater was a smash.

“I just thought it was so lovely,” said first-time reader Manalis, a Laguna Beach psychotherapist. “It reminds me of the way people used to spend an evening communicating before television.”

With its beam ceilings, scattered green plants, antiques and homey atmosphere, Upchurch-Brown Booksellers is an ideal setting to--as Mellow put it--”sit back and soak up the words.”

Mary Upchurch said she and co-owner Robert Brown had discussed offering Readers Theater at the bookstore before it opened nine months ago. Then, in April, Mellow came into the store and proposed doing an evening of reading. “It was serendipitous,” Upchurch said.

The first evening was held at the bookstore in June, with standing room only. In fact, Upchurch said, they had to add a second seating to accommodate the 30 other people “milling outside.”

“The exciting thing is that people are volunteering their time to participate in this,” said Brown. “They go through a lot of rehearsals. It’s really a community effort and that’s exciting.”

McIlroy, Manalis and the other two Laguna residents who read during the recent program, Nancy Roth and Frank Ballotta, each paid $50 to attend Mellow’s six-week readers theater workshop, which meets at Upchurch-Brown Booksellers.

“He was very gentle,” said Manalis, who had never performed in public before. “He gave you guidelines, but you didn’t feel like you had to jump through hoops.”

The Chicago-born Mellow, 52, earned a master of fine arts degree from the Goodman Theatre of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1959. In the early ‘60s, he wrote, directed and produced “The Looking Glass Revue,” an innovative children’s program in which children played roles with professional actors. The show aired on NBC in New York in the early ‘60s and in Canada in 1968. Mellow, who took the revue into schools in the ‘70s, also produced two short-lived Broadway musicals in the late ‘60s: “The Education of Hyman Kaplin” and “How To Steal an Election: The Dirty Politics Musical.”

But Mellow, a Laguna resident who earns his living as a food broker and wine label designer, hadn’t been involved in the theater for about six years until deciding to start his readers theater last spring.

In wanting to return to his “true love,” Mellow said, he felt readers theater was “a natural because it’s a chance to share live performance on an intimate level.”

Mellow said he approaches Readers Theater from a theatrical standpoint.

“I create an attitude and a theme and I involve the audience in that theme and attitude,” he said. “The material is then timed and scheduled so it has a rhythm and flow to it, so the audience becomes carried along in the wave of the spoken word.

“We never announce what we’re reading until we’ve read it. The audience is just listening to the words without giving it any preconceived thought. The audience enjoys that: They feel like they’re sitting at home in their living room among friends, which is what my goal is.”

Upchurch said the bookstore is planning many other activities in the coming months, such as a young-adult authors weekend and a mystery writers weekend. But she’s not sure when the next readers theater will be held.

Mellow said he plans to begin making a living from readers theater, taking it out of the bookstore setting and into people’s homes.

This fall, he said, he’ll be doing readers theater at several fund-raisers and, in keeping with the national election, he’ll begin offering a political readers theater, “From Mr. Dooley to Adlai Stevenson,” in September.

“My intention,” he said, “is to take readers theater to all sorts of nooks and crannies all over Orange County.”

But, Mellow said, he’ll continue doing readers theater at Upchurch-Brown because, he said, “It has such a good feeling.”

McIlroy, a sometime-actress who had performed in a readers theater in Palo Alto several years ago, agrees.

“I think it’s kind of a neat setting: to be in the middle of books and to hear books come alive,” she said. “I think the people that come to bookstores, we all love it, don’t we?”

Books & Authors runs every other Saturday in Orange County Life.