BRATTLEBORO — The first thing that Robert Fritz, an accomplished author, scriptwriter, filmmaker, and musician from Newfane, will tell you is that I Used to Have This Cat “is such a great play.”
The bold confidence inspires an obvious first question for Fritz, who wrote and directed the play for Rock River Players, a community theater group in the West River Valley: So what makes it great?
“Let's begin with the actors,” Fritz said of the two women in the show, which opens at the Hooker-Dunham Theater on Thursday, March 1 and stars Sara Vitale and Natalie Nielson. “Both are absolutely fantastic.”
The two actors did not sign on to perform in an existing play. Rather, Fritz wrote the play expressly for them, he said - “to play right into their artistry.”
Nielson - who Fritz described as “a real leading lady” - lives in New Hampshire and has worked with Fritz in three of his previous film projects. Vitale, a trained actor who by day works as an art therapist for special-needs children, is one of Rock River Players' founding members and a current member of its board of directors.
Fritz said he began working with the Players to meet new local talent for his films and to try his hand at writing plays.
He has achieved both goals.
For the new talent piece, he met Vitale, who ended up in one of his films. She, Neilson and another local actor, Stewart McDermet, star in a short film, A Visit, which is now on the festival circuit and has begun to win some awards.
And for the playwriting, Fritz - who had directed productions but had never written for theater - gave himself a date to launch a play that he had not yet written. He wrote I Used to Have This Cat in six days. He took inspiration on the play's form from the work of playwright Sam Shepard, whose True West explores the interactions and interrelations between two brothers - and from there, he writes in a director's statement, the form has endless possibilities.
Fritz remains deliberately circumspect about the plot points of the play, not wanting to drop spoilers.
“It certainly deals with the relationship between the two sisters, and it has lots of twists and turns that are just delightful,” he said. “It's poignant, it's entertaining, it's fun. It's dramatic in moments. It's funny in moments.”
Bringing a bare stage to life
Fritz describes a final script for the stage as “much more literary” than what works in film.
On the stage, actors can deliver monologues and soliloquies, he said. Theatrical devices can transport the audience in ways that would be impossible for film to do.
For instance, Fritz pointed out that the first of the two acts takes place on a bare stage.
“And yet through theatrical devices we see them in the bookstore,” Fritz said. “You know in various places some of that's done through sound bites done through theater. And you really swear you seeing on stage something that doesn't actually exist before.”
'A real evening in the theater'
The first run of the play took place in Newfane last October. Since that time, Fritz has tinkered some with the script, adding a character to the many off-stage personas who come into the storyline.
And, he said, he and his two actors have taken and refined the play to “a whole other level of nuance in the performance.”
The three are looking forward to performing in the Hooker-Dunham, which, Fritz described as having “a beautiful little theater.”
And he hopes that people will walk out with satisfaction.
“It's a real evening in the theater,” he said, noting reactions of people who attended the first run of the play last fall. “There were absolutely delighted.”