First lady, second take
With director's help, playwright reworks 'Eleanor'
Getting a handle on a historical figure as storied as Eleanor Roosevelt is tricky.
"Eleanor: Her Secret Journey," which is being revived at the Berkshire Theatre Festival starting Tuesday, was adapted by Rhoda Lerman from her book "Eleanor" as a one-woman play for actress Jean Stapleton. Although Stapleton, who toured "Eleanor" in the late '90s, received praise for her portrayal of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, reviews of the play noted the weak structure.
"When a star of that magnitude is involved, that defines how the event is going to go," says Stephen Temperley, who is directing the Berkshire production where his own play, "Souvenir," debuted three summers ago. "But I think this is a wonderful opportunity for Rhoda to revisit the play and rework some pieces. She always felt the beginning and end of the play weren't completely thought through."
As a playwright himself, Temperley says he has a unique perspective on the process.
"I tried to write 'Souvenir' 25 years ago, but it had a lot of characters and didn't make any sense," he says of his hilarious and poignant play about Florence Foster Jenkins, a 1930s socialite who mistakenly believed she was a great soprano. "But once I found the right perspective, and told the story from her accompanist's point of view, I was able to write the play in two weeks. The key was that the audience sees Florence through his eyes."
"Eleanor: Her Secret Journey," captures Roosevelt (played by Elizabeth Norment) in 1945, soon after her husband's death, at the moment when she's deciding whether or not to accept President Harry Truman's offer to be part of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. In the course of making her decision, she accepts several phone calls and has several flashbacks, particularly to her experiences during World War I, when her husband was Secretary of the Navy.
"My responsibility is similar to what a director does with a new play script," says Temperley. "That is, make sure each scene builds the story we're trying to tell. At the same time, my skills as a playwright come into use when I can look at the script and see the places where the story gets lost."
Although Eleanor Roosevelt was a patrician who inhabited a world quite different from most Americans, what resonates, says Temperley, is her decision to reinvent herself at age 61.
"She could have chosen quiet retirement, and a private life," he says, "instead she chose to step out of her husband's shadow and step into that world she'd been observing from a distance."
Temperley says Lerman's script addresses FDR's infidelity, and the position that left Eleanor in, as well as her commitment to getting him elected, but it isn't a complete biography. "This really addresses a moment when she is forced to confront a key episode in her life and make a choice about her future. I think that's something everyone can relate to." 