New Lines in Black ‘Love Letters’

“Most American men have to get involved with a dark-skinned woman before they can connect with the blond goddesses they really love,” wrote Melissa Gardner in a letter to Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. She was kidding her old friend about his romantic entanglement with a Japanese woman.

Melissa and Andrew are the creations of A.R. Gurney, and the line is from his “Love Letters.”

This week, the two roles in the long-running staged reading of “Love Letters” in Beverly Hills are being played by African Americans--Alfre Woodard and Blair Underwood. How do they handle such a line?

They change it. Or actually, author Gurney changed it, prior to Diahann Carroll and Paul Winfield’s appearance in August as the first blacks in the play.

In the revised line, “dark-skinned” becomes “exotic” and “blond” becomes “buxom,” according to the show’s director, Ted Weiant, who added: “The line is about an American myth. Some of the (Caucasian) brunettes who play the role want to change ‘blond’ to ‘brunette,’ but I tell them, ‘It’s not about you. It’s about a myth.’ ”

A second line also was changed for the black casts. In Andrew’s description of himself and Melissa in middle age--”two uptight old WASPs” in the original--”WASPs” is replaced by “farts.” The word is not new to the characters’ vocabulary; a younger Melissa used it to describe their parents.

The script details how the two wealthy WASPs were raised in the privileged environs of Northeastern prep schools in the ‘30s to the ‘50s--not a period when blacks would have been likely students at such schools. With Winfield and Carroll, said Weiant, “you got the feeling they were plucked from their race and raised differently (from most blacks). And their correspondence with each other reminds them of who they really are.”

Steven Fertig, casting director for the show, said the producers are open to couplings of all races--including cross-racial. “Hispanics might be coming up soon,” he said. Asians? “I don’t know there are that many Asian celebrities of box-office value.”

Besides box office, he continued, “the important thing is you have to believe they went to school together. (A similarity in) age is more important than color.” That omits the possibility of a joint appearance by Bob Hope and Brooke Shields, he noted--”though each of those names has come up separately.”

‘SAIGON’ FALLOUT, PART 6: India-born Shishir Kurup is the new director of the AsianAmerican Theatre Project at Los Angeles Theatre Center.

His predecessor, Dom Magwili, resigned in August, protesting LATC producing director Diane White’s published remarks denouncing Actors Equity’s initial decision (since reversed) to bar the casting of Jonathan Pryce in a Eurasian role in “Miss Saigon.”

In a statement that re-affirmed the theater’s commitment to nontraditional casting and accompanied the announcement of Kurup’s appointment, White and Bushnell referred to “the insensitivity of (‘Saigon’ producer) Cameron Mackintosh to the current American social and cultural scene.”

The statement was issued following a special meeting of the AsianAmerican group with Bushnell and White in response to Magwili’s resignation. Some of the group’s members said they would join Magwili in leaving LATC if theater officials did not issue such a statement.

Members of the AsianAmerican group also are disgruntled because no shows have moved from their group to LATC mainstages since the group was founded in 1988. Kurup said that achieving such a move would be his “main thrust.”

Kurup, who left India at the age of 5 and was raised in Kenya and the United States, is the author of a play, “Skeleton Dance,” that recently received a grant from the Flintridge Foundation and received a staged reading at LATC earlier this year. He holds a graduate degree from UC San Diego and has studied in Japan under director Tadashi Suzuki . . .

Using a $20,000 grant from NBC, LATC’s Latino Theatre Lab will present three free staged readings Saturday and Sunday at the theater. Information: (213) 627-6500.

A NEW CONTRACT: After years of producer complaints, Actors Equity has instituted a new Hollywood Area Theatre contract for commercial productions in mid-sized theaters.

The new contract covers theaters from 100 to 499 seats, instead of the old contract’s top capacity of 399. It divides the theaters into four categories, measured by capacity; Category A covers 100-to-199-seat theaters, while Category D covers 400-to-499-seat theaters.

The minimum scale rises from $250/week in Category A to $450/week in Category D. If the weekly gross is over $20,000, the scale begins to rise; in the old contract, the gross above which the scale rose was $8,000. The new contract’s top minimum is $600 (for productions in Categories C or D that gross more than $60,000/week).

The new contract omits the previous contract’s “short week” scale for productions that played four or fewer performances. “At this point, no one is going to produce a short work week,” said the union’s Western regional director George Ives. Theater rental costs are weekly, he noted, so he believes that producers will want to do full weeks (eight performances) to maximize returns.

The producers of “The House of Yes,” opening Oct. 23 at Las Palmas Theatre, are the first to sign the new contract, said Ives.