Growing up in the Alhambra Theatre, Jessica “Jessie” Booth began acting as a young child. Now she lives in New York City, making her living as an actress, singer and dancer.
The show business life is a competitive one, so to add another skill to her resume, Booth is now directing, too.
She made her directorial debut with the play “Love Letters,” which opened Jan. 9 and will run through Feb. 9. The play, by A.R. Gurney, was a finalist in 1988 for a Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Centering around two people, a man and a woman, it dramatizes their lifelong relationship in letters, with a simple stage set and only the two characters.
Those two characters are portrayed by Jessie Booth’s parents.
Tod Booth, the Alhambra’s former owner and current Creative Director, reads the letters of the man, Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. Lisa Valdini-Booth, who has performed in more than 200 Alhambra performances, reads the letters of the woman, Melissa Gardner. They sit side by side at desks facing the audience as they take turns reading the notes, letters and cards the characters wrote to each other over a period of 50-plus years.
“Love Letters” debuted on Broadway in 1988 and since then has been performed by many famous celebrity-couples, including Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson.
The characters began writing to each other in second grade and continued their correspondence into their fifties. “The suspense of the story is that you don’t know where the relationship is going to go. It’s beautiful, funny, warm and romantic,” Jessie Booth said the day before the show went on. She had been in Jacksonville for three months while performing in two previous Alhambra shows and felt she was leaving “Love Letters” in good hands as she got ready to say goodbye and fly back to New York. Her parents had their parts down, she said, and it would be up to the stage manager to monitor them every night and keep them on track with what she had directed.
“This is a unique show,” Lisa Valdini-Booth said. “We are reading letters, so no memorization is really required.”
“The simplicity of the set,” which is basically just two desks, “keeps the concentration on the words,” Tod Booth said. “Why do they write letters? Because they can express in all honesty what they feel. The essence is a recorded personal history between two people. It is permanent, can be kept forever.”
Since they are writing at different ages, it makes it challenging as an actor to capture the characters, Tod Booth said. “You have got to do it with your voice and facial expressions.”
Adding to the challenge is that the two actors can not look at each other. “They look straight out at the audience or at the script,” Jessie Booth said. “It’s very difficult to do it right, from kids to older age, an arc of life, with all its foibles, mistakes and regrets.”
Together, Tod Booth and Lisa Valdini-Booth have more than 100 years of experience in the theater. Jessie Booth said it has been “very exciting” directing them. Given her parent’s status in the theater community, she said not many people would have felt comfortable doing it. “But I know them so well, this was really fun. It’s been wonderful and easy.”
With her job done and feeling comfortable handing it over to the stage manager to uphold it, she said she was heading back to the Big Apple to audition for a New York production.
“I go back to the audition grind,” she said. “I’m an actor, primarily.” As for directing, that works, too. “I just love theater,” she said. “In whatever form it takes, I’ll take it.”
