Heartache, in their own words

WALTHAM -- It isn't often that actors can reach into a box -- quite literally -- and find letters penned by their characters that inform and illuminate their roles. It's even more remarkable that the letters are discovered in an archive less than 10 miles from their stage.

But such was the experience of Brendan McNab and Bridget Beirne as they prepared for their parts in the SpeakEasy Stage Company production of "Parade," the Tony Award-winning musical based on the notorious Leo Frank case in Georgia. The show -- receiving its Boston professional premiere -- is now in previews at the Boston Center for the Arts.

McNab plays Frank, the New York-raised Jewish manager of an Atlanta factory convicted on circumstantial evidence of murdering a 13-year-old girl who worked for him in 1913; he was abducted from prison and lynched by a mob of citizens seeking to avenge her death. Beirne plays his wife, Lucille , a quintessential Southern belle who courageously defended him.

Earlier this month, the actors found themselves facing a rich repository of letters at Brandeis University between the Franks and others that brought them powerful new perspectives on their characters. Eight sturdy manuscript boxes were filled with yellowed letters, thank-you notes to Frank's supporters, news clippings, legal documents, even Lucille Frank's daily planner.

"It was amazing," said McNab afterward by phone. "It was just this reality setting in. You've been looking at books and at the play and thinking, "Oh yeah, this is a guy from history," and all of a sudden you are looking at these handwritten letters in pencil, down to his absolutely gorgeous signature. It gives so much more of a hu man element to the characters."

The 1998 musical, written by Alfred Uhry with a score by Jason Robert Brown, presented SpeakEasy with the particular challenge of being true to the real-life characters. A few weeks ago, SpeakEasy marketing director Jim Torres was researching the case when he stumbled across a reference to the Leo Frank Trial Collection of letters and documents at Brandeis University's special collections department.

The collection was donated to Brandeis in 1961 by an Atlanta relative of Lucille Frank; Lucille, who died in 1957, was a life member of the Brandeis University National Women's Committee, according to Brandeis archivist Karen Adler Abramson. While other documents related to the case are located in repositories in Atlanta and Cincinnati, "Brandeis believes it has the most comprehensive collection of personal correspondence," Abramson says.

The archive includes letters between Leo and Lucille during their courtship as well as documents written over the period of Frank's arrest, trial, imprisonment, and lynching on Aug. 17, 1915. It contains letters the Franks wrote to journalists and influential citizens across the country seeking help and guidance, as well as letters written on their behalf to the governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton, who commuted Frank's original death sentence to life imprisonment. Many poignantly reveal Frank's certainty that the case would be resolved in his favor.

"While I am sorely distressed by the many reverses I have had, I can but feel that eventually the cause of innocence, justice and truth will be vindicated, and that I will again take my place among the world of men, with name and liberty restored," Frank wrote one of his attorneys on May 4, 1915.

Sifting through the archives "was a pretty amazing, overwhelming day," Bridget Beirne said. "It's always different when you are portraying a character who is historically based, but to be able to hold something they actually write is unbelievable."

"Parade" is the last of Uhry's Atlanta trilogy of plays, all dealing with Jewish families in the South during the first half of the 20th century. The others are "Driving Miss Daisy" (1987), for which Uhry, who grew up in Atlanta, won both a Pulitzer Prize (in 1988) and an Oscar (in 1990, for the 1989 screenplay adapted from the play) ; and "The Last Night at Ballyhoo," (1996) which won a Tony.

Uhry, 70, has a family connection to the Leo Frank story. Frank was hired to manage a pencil factory owned by Uhry's great uncle, Sig Montag. Uhry's grandmother was a friend of Lucille's, who worked in an upscale dress store and never remarried. "My grandmother said she signed all of her correspondence "Mrs. Leo M. Frank," Uhry said. "She never tried to hide it."

It's now generally believed that the murderer was Jim Conley, a black janitor at the factory, Uhry says, and that Frank fell victim to a confluence of factors including anti-Semitism, concern about child labor, political opportunism, and a sensationalist press.

"When Mary Phagan, this angel child of 13, was murdered in a factory . . . they found a perfect villain -- a Yankee and a funny-looking little Jew who was uptight and looked strange," Uhry said by phone from New York, the day before his new musical, "LoveMusik," opened on Broadway.

The case, and the anti-Semitic furor that surrounded it, now stands as a watershed moment in American Jewish history, an event that helped lead to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League and the revitalization of the dormant Ku Klux Klan.

But it was the relationship between Leo and Lucille that captivated Uhry "because it moved me so much," he said. "It was Lucille's emergence from proper young southern lady to serve her husband's cause, much like the emergence of Eleanor Roosevelt."

This relationship is central to Uhry's rendering of the Frank story and to artistic director Paul Daigneault's interpretation of it. It is clear that the Franks were in love with each other, said McNab. But the letters "made [them] so much more real and tangible."

McNab discovered, for example, that the hard-driving factory manager was also witty, making a playful reference to his boss (Uhry's great uncle) in a letter to Lucille before they were married. "You would not believe it, but between the last sentence + this one, 20 minutes have elapsed. Mr. Sig. came in to talk to me -- nuff said!"

Leo was also deeply adoring, signing his letters to Lucille "your sweetheart" and "fondly your beau," and expressing concern for her state of mind even as his legal woes deepened.

"I expect that you are a trifle 'under the weather' over the storm through which we have passed," he wrote his wife in a letter dated June 22, 1915, sent from the State Prison Farm in Milledgeville, Ga. "It has indeed been an ordeal for both of us my darling but in time both of us will be happy."

"We learned so much about them from their own words," said Beirne. "Leo was very much a romantic; he wrote to her every two days when they were courting." It was extraordinary, she said, "to see her go from this loving wife to these letters at the end when she is on her own two feet and speaking not only about the lynching but in a broader historical sense. It was like she knew this was an event that was going to be important for people to remember."

Beirne says one of the most amazing finds in the archive was Lucille's tiny handsewn daily planner, a promotional item from the State Mutual Life Assurance Co. of Worcester, which she used as a diary. One heart-wrenching entry was dated July 17, 1915, following an attempt by another inmate on Frank's life.

"How can I write what I saw last night. Was called about one A.M. My darling is nearly dead. Some fiend cut his throat from back to front. I wonder he survived even temporarily. . . . He looks at me and smiles such a dear smile. When I came into the room he could barely make himself understood but he whispered 'Angel.' "

The diary ends, simply, with a single entry in Lucille's usual script, written three days after her husband was hanged from an oak tree in Marietta. "My darling is buried," she wrote. "[W] hat has life for me now."

Linda Matchan can be reached at l_matchan@globe.com.