Post by Edith S. Baker on Jul 25, 2010 15:21:58 GMT -4
By Bill Thompson
The Post and Courier
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Successful marriages are not unlike a canny approach to acting: Celebrate the triumphs with a becoming grace and treat all disasters as incidents (but none of the incidents as disasters).
Carrie Preston and Michael Emerson seem to have a handle on what works.
Stars of HBO’s “True Blood” and ABC’s “Lost,” respectively, they met 15 years ago while doing “Hamlet” at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and have performed in the same productions on several occasions.
If you go
WHAT: Charleston Stage’s Sizzling Summer Soiree.
STARRING: Carrie Preston and Michael Emerson.
WHEN: Saturday at 6:30 p.m.
WHERE: Dock Street Theatre.
TICKETS: Regular seats are $125 for adults and $50 for students; premium seats are $250 per person, and sponsor boxes are $5,000.
CONTACT: 577-7183 or charlestonstage.com.
Together again for Charleston Stage’s Sizzling Summer Soiree, a staged reading on Saturday of A.R. Gurney’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play “Love Letters,” the couple say pulling in tandem is chiefly a matter of shorthand.
It’s always rewarding to act with Michael because we already have a built-in history,” says Preston, a Charleston Stage alumna. “All the stuff you have to do in working with an actor you don’t know is not needed. The trust already is there and does not need to be built.”
Adds Emerson, “We don’t work together all that often in our professional life. But doing ‘Love Letters’ is attractive to me because I know the other half of the project is in good hands. You don’t have to take time to get to know one another, so you can cut to the chase. And Carrie is as funny and as emotionally available as any actress I’ve ever worked with. We’ve spent the last 15 years talking about drama.”
The Soiree unfolds at 6:30 p.m. at the restored Dock Street Theatre, with pre-performance cocktails in theater’s grand foyer and upstairs drawing room, followed at 7:30 p.m. by the reading. Following the performance, Charleston Stage founder and producing artistic director Julian Wiles will moderate a short question-and-answer session with the stars. Premium ticket holders will be invited to a private home for an after-party with the actors.
A two-character piece, “Love Letters” focuses on Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, who sit side by side at tables and read all the missives — notes, cards and letters — they have exchanged over the course of 50 years of leading separated lives.
“It’s just lovely to see a relationship that starts at so young an age and goes all the way through two people’s lives,” says Preston. “You connect with someone, and even though you are not able to be that person every day, the connection lasts a lifetime. The play gives you a real sense of what each of these people’s lives are like outside the letters, which is masterful writing.”
Actors are particularly fond of the play, first performed in 1988, because the memorization of lines is not required. For many, it’s a refreshing change of pace, even a respite.
“It’s meant to be done as a reading rather than acted out,” says Preston. “Which is good because there will be no time to rehearse.”
“It’s fun to remove that pressure,” adds Emerson. “Sometimes, nice things happen when people are reading a script on the fly. Anyway, when you are an actor in the New York theater, you seem to spend your life doing readings, and you gain a facility for it.”
It was 24 years ago that a young College of Charleston student auditioned for and won the title role in Charleston Stage’s production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
“From the first rehearsal,” recalls Wiles, “I knew we had a major talent.”
Time has borne him out. A native of Macon, Ga., Preston completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Evanston and later at the Juilliard School, then got her first big break with a starring role as Miranda in the Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” opposite Patrick Stewart.
Hollywood soon beckoned. Preston appeared in such features as “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Mercury Rising,” “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” “Transamerica,” “The Stepford Wives,” “Duplicity” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
Most recently, she starred with Emerson in her own production company’s (Daisy 3 Pictures) “Ready? OK!” and in “South by Southwest,” while making recurring guest appearances on the CBS series “The Good Wife” as well as “True Blood,” now in its third season.
Preston guest-starred on “Lost” with her husband, who played the character of Ben Linus, appearing as Linus’ mother in several flashback scenes, though the two never did a scene jointly.
Emerson and Preston both were featured in the 2004 comedy “Straight-Jacket.”
With the third season of “True Blood” now airing, Preston is on hiatus from the series until November.
“We only shoot 12 episodes a year for HBO, so it’s six months on, six months off — a great schedule. It’s a huge ensemble, and it’s been a fun project. Even when I’m shooting ‘True Blood,’ they’ve been very permissive in letting me do other work when the schedule allows.”
Raised in a small farming community in Iowa, Emerson majored in theater at Drake University and promptly moved to New York. He began work as a magazine illustrator, but renewed ties with acting in a production of “Othello” in Florida, thereafter investing five years performing in plays throughout the South, bolstering his income by working as a landscaper, carpenter, teacher and director.
He was in the MFA program at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery when he met his future wife, soon following her to New York. He got his own break in 1997 starring as Oscar Wilde in Moises Kaufman’s acclaimed off-Broadway play, “Gross Indecency,” then debuted on Broadway two years later in “The Iceman Cometh.”
Moving to TV, he won an Emmy Award in 2001 for a guest star turn in “The Practice” and has since appeared on “Law & Order,” “The X-Files,” “Without a Trace” and the HBO movie “The Laramie Project.” He captured another Emmy in 2009 for his continuing role in “Lost.”
Emerson also has appeared in the features “Saw,” “The Legend of Zorro” and “The Impostors.”
He is now “two months into my post-’Lost’ life.” Emerson completed shooting on the finale of the series in April and spent most of May publicizing it. After the Charleston gig, he’s in no rush to jump into another project.
“I’ve been taking it easy. I wanted a little down time. But I’m keeping my hand in. In the not-too-distant future, I’d like to go back to the stage.”
Source: The Post and Courier.
