It's still a baby, its umbilical cord barely severed. It totters on wobbly legs but it doesn't fall. It makes noises but they are not all easy to understand. It's a love story which, like all love stories, is filled with pain and frustration. It's a play, a new, young play about Missouri's most famous writer and an important part of his life.
"Sam and Laura," a love story about Samuel (Mark Twain) Clemens and Laura Wright that still is in the staged-reading phase, opened a two-night run at the Gaslight Theatre last night as a production of the St. Louis Actors Studio. It plays again tonight, beginning at 8 o'clock. Author Ron Powers, born in Hannibal, educated at Mizzou, a one-time Post-Dispatch sports writer and the paper's first TV critic, was on hand to watch his infant take a few more steps. It has had readings in Castleton, VT, where Powers lives and teaches, and in Columbia, MO, and another is scheduled for next month in Calaveras County, where Twain's famous Jumping Frog made his debut.
Powers has tied Clemens' life with a legend about the woman after whom Becky Thatcher was modeled, and a tale, perhaps apocryphal, about why he ran for Nevada and California.
Sally Eaton, a fine actress, portrays the no-longer-young Laura, marking her 80th birthday and looking back through the years during an interview by Kevin Boehm. The question-and-answer routine can get very dull as the play continues, but Powers rescues it with an occasional bright and bawdy exchange. Sam and Laura are Hannibal children, he promises to write when he and his brother, Henry, leave town to go to work on the river boats, but of course family interference shreds that ideal. When Henry dies in a river accident and Laura and Sam discover why she received no mail, he flees for the west "with his head on fire," as Laura puts it.
We hear about Clemens' writing success in Nevada and California, and his further triumphs as a public speaker and touring author, even without the benefit of talk radio and Sunday morning television shows. I wonder, however, if we do not get too much of Twain as speaker and not enough of Twain as writer. I understand that Powers is trying to avoid writing another "Mark Twain Tonight," but I think more of Twain and less of the dialogue between Eaton and Boehm, which often rings false, might make the play more accessible, and more entertaining, too. But there is a beginning of a real play in "Sam and Laura;" though it will take the struggles of infancy, the pangs of childhood, the roller-coaster of adolescence before it can be full-grown.
Director Milt Zoth keeps things moving nicely, though he is stuck with a cast that is basically static. It's difficult to move naturally while carrying a script in a three-ring binder. James Slover's lighting design is effective.
Eaton does well as the older Laura, and Elizabeth Tucker is the young Laura, with Chad Morris the young Sam. Others in the cast, all playing multiple roles, are Cara Artman, Boo McLaughlin, Slover and Keith Thompson.
Sam and Laura, by Ron Powers, presented by the St. Louis Actors Studio at the Gaslight Theater, at 8 p.m. Saturday.
–Joe