Connections on the Stage and Ooff

Betty Garrett feels a lot of good karma surrounding Theatre West’s production of “Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology,” which opened on Garrett’s 83rd birthday Thursday. Garrett, who appeared in the original production of “Spoon River” four decades ago, is directing the revival, which features longtime Theatre West members Lee Meriwether and Bridget Hanley. Musical director and supervisor Naomi Caryl, also an original cast member, wrote the music.

“We have some wonderful coincidences in this whole production,” Garrett says during a recent interview with Hanley, Caryl and Meriwether in her woodsy Studio City home. “Lee is doing the part she understudied. Drew Katzman, who is playing Actor No. 1, is married to Jane George, the actress who plays the Girl Singer. And my son, Andrew Parks, is understudying Abbott Alexander.” Alexander, she explains, just happens to be the son of Philip Abbott, who starred in the 10th anniversary production of “Spoon River.”

“Spoon River” was first produced at Theatre West in 1962, before moving to UCLA. It then went to Broadway in late 1963. The show, which put the fledgling Theatre West on the map, was conceived, adapted and arranged by the late Charles Aidman, a Theatre West co-founder. Based on the poems of Edgar Lee Masters, the musical drama revolves around the dead in an Illinois graveyard who talk about their lives. Most of the characters and experiences were based on people Masters knew growing up in Lewiston and Petersburg, Ill.

“What Chuck did with the poems was so wonderful,” Garrett says. “If you see the book of poems, it is just one poem after the other. What Chuck did was gather the poems together in such a way you saw the connections between the people and you begin to get a vision of this whole town of people and their interrelations with each other.”

Theatre West began its life with a meeting of six people including Aidman, Curt Conway and Joyce Van Patten. “As a matter of fact, I was asked to be at the first meeting, which was at a place over in Hollywood,” recalls Garrett, who starred in such classic MGM musicals as “On the Town” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” “It was a pouring, rainy night, and I couldn’t find the apartment. I always regret I wasn’t at the very first meeting. But I was at the next one.”

After doing workshops of various shows and scenes at locales around town, they found their first real home in a tiny theater on Robertson Boulevard. “That’s where we started working on ‘Spoon River,’” Garrett said. Theatre West moved to its current location on Cahuenga Boulevard West in 1967.

Meriwether joined the group about seven months after its inception. “I got in by going to a bar,” says the former Miss America who later became known as Catwoman in the 1966 film “Batman.” “I was doing a play or something, and after the show we ended up going to a bar. And there I saw Curt Conway. I had studied with Curt in New York. He said to me, ‘We’ve got this great workshop.’”

Hanley became a member of the troupe in 1973. “I was lucky enough to get three people to write me a letter of recommendation, and I joined,” she says. “The night I came in, it was just packed. I was just in awe. It has been the most incredibly creative home anyone who could ask for.”

“She’s used the workshop better than anyone,” says Garrett, glancing over at Hanley. “She’s done so many creative things that originated with her. I did my one-woman show there. I first got up just trying to get something out of my system. I wanted to do a few songs, and everybody encouraged me to go further. The next thing, I had a two-hour, one-woman show I have taken all over the United States and London.”

Garrett believes there is no place other than Theatre West in Los Angeles that’s conducive to experiment and work on various pieces.

The actress teaches a musical comedy workshop there on Wednesday nights, and Meriwether says she occasionally attends. Over the years, Meriwether has worked on such musicals as “Mame,” “Hello, Dolly! and “Follies” under Garrett’s guidance at the workshop.

In the case of “Spoon River,” Caryl relates that Aidman, who died in 1993, had loved Masters’ poetry since his college days and would perform poems at workshops

Garrett became involved with “Spoon River” because of another play, “Anne of the Thousand Days.” She had been bugging Aidman to do some scenes with her from the play, but Aidman, she says, was always too busy to play Henry VIII to her Anne.

“One day I walked into theater and said, ‘Are you ready to do “Anne of the Thousand Days”?’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what--I’ll do that if you do this for me.’ It was the ‘Spoon River’ poems. We never did ‘Anne of the Thousand Days.’”

Caryl, who served as stage manager for the workshops before becoming a cast member, recalls the first performance of poems, which lasted about 25 minutes. “It was just stunning,” she says. A few days later, she got a call from Aidman. “He said, ‘I hear you sing.’ He wanted to have a folk song at the beginning. I said it had to be on tape because I don’t perform live anymore. The only folk song I really knew was ‘He’s Gone Away,’ which is a traditional song. It was the perfect piece. That’s the way the show still opens.”

Director Lamont Johnson, who was involved with the theater group at UCLA that later became Center Theatre Group, caught some of the early “Spoon River” performances. “He got very excited about it,” Caryl says. “He encouraged Chuck to expand it and have more music.”

Caryl recalls going home, playing music on the piano and thinking, ‘This is very ‘Spoon River-y.’ I brought a piece in one day, and Chuck got all excited and wanted to write words to it. A lot of the original songs came that way. The other songs came from research--looking for things that fit the time period or fit some of the poems. It was one of the most exciting and creative experiences I ever had.”

Because the show has only four actors, each cast member plays up to 18 citizens of “Spoon River.” To differentiate among characters, the actors make subtle changes with props, like adding a bandanna or a pair of glasses. The transformation, says Garrett, “is all visible to the audience. Except for the lights, which focus on the person actually reciting, the person is right there changing in front of you. There is a whole technique to that which I have impressed on all the cast members--when you do it, you become invisible; you do everything very slowly so it doesn’t distract.”

“Spoon River” ran for more than 100 performances on Broadway in late 1963 and early ’64. “We were supposed to go for a four-week concert tour, but we got such rave reviews,” Garrett says. “What’s unusual is that we got good reviews because the New York critics for some reason or another seem to be down on anything that comes from this coast.”

The New York Times called the show “a brooding and loving American folk poem brought to life on stage ... [that] has been transmuted into a glowing theater experience.” The New York World-Telegram and Sun proclaimed that the actors had “done right and more than right by Masters, by his volume of discerning, biographical verse....The small town folk he wrote about have never seemed more alive, more explicitly present, or more warmly welcome.”

“It really is a genuine masterpiece,” Meriwether says. “Each person who sees it will find at least 50% of the show they can relate to, in one way or another. It touches on all different levels--your heart and your brain and your soul.”

“Spoon River” has even more relevance since the events of Sept. 11. “I think people are sort of seeing some sort of balance and some kind of getting down to humanity instead of technical things,” Garrett says.

“In ‘Spoon River,’ these are people who are all dead, but what they are doing is revealing themselves as they never could in life,” the actress says. “I think that’s so meaningful when someone comes out and says, ‘I was wrong and I did this and I did that.’ It is the outpouring of their feelings, I think, that makes people relate to it.”

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“EDGAR LEE MASTERS’ SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY,” Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Los Angeles. Dates: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Through June 23. No performance on June 21. Prices: $25. Phone: (323) 851-7977 or go to www.theatrewest.org.

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Susan King is a Times staff writer.