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Photo Ann Wood
Playwright Susann Fletcher flanked by Kathy Deitch (left) and Stacia Fernandez, the two actresses who play Dusty Springfield in “A Girl Called Dusty.” |
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The painful transformation of Dusty Springfield
Playwright looks at the troubled teen inside the superstar
By Ann Wood & Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff
Mary O’Brien was an overweight bespectacled teenager with mousy brown hair who realized her looks wouldn’t do. So out came the bleach, off came the glasses and away went the name. What that pitiful girl consciously transformed herself into was the world-famous pop singer Dusty Springfield. Then the internal battle began.
Acclaimed Broadway actress and now playwright Susann Fletcher brings Springfield back to life in the dramatic play with music, “A Girl Called Dusty,” which makes its world premiere here and previews at 8 p.m. Thursday at The Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St., Provincetown. “Dusty” officially opens Saturday and runs at 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and Sunday, and at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Saturdays. Tickets are $30, $35 for Friday and Saturday, and can be purchased online at ptowntix.com or by calling (508) 487-9793.
After this production there are several options for the play including runs in Coconut Grove or Dallas with the ultimate goal being an extended run in New York.
It’s Springfield’s battle with herself that fascinates Fletcher, who found her while she was looking for a one-person show.
“They really were at war with each other for most of her life,” she says of O’Brien and Springfield, and adds that’s why she’s created the two different characters in her play. But that’s not all. “One of my favorite compliments of the piece is that the music seems like it was made for the piece. … You can go through her music and chronicle where she was emotionally.” Fletcher says, then stops for a beat. “Stacia [Fernandez] is not doing an impersonation of Dusty, she’s doing a representation.” Fletcher goes on to explain that Springfield has some die-hard fans who are out to see an actor that will imitate even her hand gestures. “She has some fairly intense fans that expect anyone who does her to do her.”
Fletcher does Springfield her own way — she originally used as many of Springfield’s quotes as possible before deciding it was more important to just tell the story — but it only came to be because her agents were after her to do a one-woman show.
“I’m pretty much a jump in without testing the waters type of person [but] I wanted it to be something that blew my skirt up,” she says, and just happened to see a Dusty Springfield biography on television. “Her story compelled me. The music compelled me, once I became aware of the depth of her artistry.”
Fletcher was surprised to find out Springfield was a lesbian. They had that in common.
“How did I miss that memo?” 49-year-old Fletcher wonders, because she was conscious of music as a child. “Somehow I just missed her. She really didn’t hit my radar screen.”
The more she heard of Springfield’s music, the more Fletcher realized that she knew those songs. She just didn’t know the woman who sang them was Dusty Springfield. But she was busy anyway, on the road performing in her critically acclaimed role of Georgie Bukatinsky in “The Full Monty.”
“The more I dug the more intrigued I became. But it was just kind of in the back of my mind,” she says. Then 9/11 happened. “That was death knell on that tour.” The musical was shut down 9/12. Fletcher had some time on her hands.
Fletcher has been on Broadway since she first hit New York as a dancer right out of college. Her first show was “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” where she played Ruby Rae and closed the show as Angel. She created the role of Donna Douglas in the original Broadway company of “The Goodbye Girl,” starring Bernadette Peters and Martin Short. She was an original company member of the Tony Award-winning “Jerome Robbin’s Broadway,” where she re-created roles from classic plays such as “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Billion Dollar Baby.” Fletcher has made guest appearances on several television shows and landed the lead role in the feature film “Bloodsucking Pharoahs in Pittsburgh,” which is gaining cult status in the slasher film world.
She wrote a novel just to see if she could do it and then stuck it in a drawer. After doing some research Fletcher decided to write a one-woman show about Dusty Springfield. She worked on it for six weeks, put “Dusty Springfield, See All Her Faces” up at the Triad Theatre in New York in 2002 — and found out it was just the beginning.
“When I came away from it I realized I respect the cabaret venue but my [thing] is musical theater,” she says. “The last three years have been a process. … I kind of consider it like I’ve gone to graduate school. … It’s funny when you suddenly discover that you have an aptitude for something you didn’t know you have.”
Besides Fernandez, the play stars Kathy Deitch as Mary O’Brien as well as Beth Beyer, Charlie Parker, Don Stitt and Tom Story in multiple roles. Fletcher realized early on that she couldn’t continue to play Springfield after the one-woman show evolved into a play, so she cast Fernandez and Deitch. It’s working out because Fletcher calls both Fernandez and Deitch “unbelievable” in their roles. Those two actresses are joined by music supervisor Dimitri Nakhamkin for the piece. For Fletcher, a step back from performing was important.
“I feel much more vulnerable as a playwright,” she says. “When we have audiences or invited guests for the reading it’s excruciating for me.”
That’s another thing she shares with Springfield, she says, adding that it was “fairly brutal” for Springfield to record her songs because she was a perfectionist.
“I wouldn’t have chosen Dusty if I didn’t resonate with her on a lot of levels,” Fletcher says.
When the one-woman show changed to a play it wasn’t just actors she needed for the show, Fletcher also went looking for a new director.
“I was looking for a woman, and there were a few women on the list,” Fletcher says, but found Evan Bergman instead. “I like men. It took me a long time to be able to say that. I think now I’m glad that there’s a male perspective on that too. … I think it gives it more depth.”
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In the Arts
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Jul 7th, 2005