Opposites Attract in ‘Lettice and Lovage’

Whatever else “Lettice and Lovage” may or may not be, the 1987 Peter Shaffer play is a great gift for two actresses. Shaffer wrote the play for his friend Maggie Smith, who complained of the lack of roles for women of a certain age. Both Smith and her co-star Margaret Tyzack won Tony Awards when the play came to Broadway in 1990. Whoopi Goldberg wanted to do the movie, which was never made. Vanessa Redgrave planned to tour with the play in 1992, until her views on the Gulf War proved too controversial, and Julie Harris took the role, but the production never made it to Los Angeles.

Now East West Players is giving the play its Los Angeles premiere, starring Amy Hill as Lettice Douffet, the enterprising British guide whose job it is to acquaint tourists with an historic estate aptly named Fustian House. Lettice is a true eccentric, a woman who insists on drama in a dull world of facts and apathy.

Since no drama has ever attached itself to the goings-on in Fustian House, Lettice fictionalizes. Soon groups of tourists who were once yawning into their sleeves are listening in trembling anticipation to Lettice’s tales of men leaping up staircases to save the Queen of England from tripping on her hem, lined in pearls dredged from the Indian Ocean. And everyone enjoys feeding on fat gobs of fiction that Lettice--a playwright at heart--invents with delight and relish.

That is until she gets caught. Enter Lotte Schoen (Emily Kuroda), the literal-minded representative from the Preservation Trust, the agency that employs Lettice. Miss Schoen takes the tour, and Miss Schoen is not amused.

But she is touched, eventually. At her firing, Lettice proudly impersonates Mary, Queen of Scots, at her beheading, and Schoen finds a begrudging admiration for Lettice’s stubborn spirit. A bond is forged between a theatrical history lover and a severely literal one, giving Shaffer much room for discussions on the need for the theatrical and the beautiful in the modern world of cold technology that so frightens and appalls his two heroines. Though the playwright’s point and his plot get dreary in the long, interminable third act, the play is about two quaintly subversive personalities, and the way they interact.

Hill and Kuroda seem young for their parts, but, under director Judith Nihei, they obviously connect and enjoy. With her big eyes that roll slowly to the skies whenever someone doesn’t understand, Hill is an impressive life force as Lettice. She shows her character to be both terribly at home with drama and sadly uncomfortable with the real world. However, Hill could stand to connect more with the other actors on the stage without losing Lettice’s peculiar isolation.

Kuroda is excellent as the severe Miss Schoen, and she is especially good when her character first meets Lettice and experiences existential doubts about her own severity. Once she loosens up, with the help of Lettice’s homemade “quaff” (it includes an herb called lovage), she lets her armor down and also too much of the character’s complexity.

Deborah Nishimura is very funny as the terrorized secretary to Miss Schoen, but Benjamin Lum is a bit predictable as Lettice’s lumpish lawyer.

* “Lettice and Lovage,” East West Players, 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends June 30. $20. (213) 660-0366. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.