Writing plays is exhausting. When a playwright finishes a work, the anxiety and complexities begin. Can I get the play staged? Will audiences like it? Is this really my calling?
That’s what Judith Pratt faced when she finished “The Wright Place.” She felt she had told an interesting story, “sparked by an event in my own life,” but before she could get the play staged, she needed the feedback that only actors and an audience could provide.
Pratt grew up in Wayland and lives in Ithaca, N.Y. She planned to have “The Wright Place” performed in a workshop setting, but where? She asked her 95-year-old mother, Jean, who has lived in Wayland for 54 years, for advice.
“She said, ‘You should send the play to Vokes,’ and I thought, ‘I’d love to have a stage reading in my hometown,’ ” Pratt recalled.
John Barrett thought it was a good idea too. The president of the Wayland-based Vokes Theatre ensemble has arranged for seven actors to portray the characters in Pratt’s play, during a staged reading in front of an audience Aug. 15 at 8 p.m., and Aug. 16 at 2 p.m.
Pratt has gone through this process with some of her other plays, which have been performed across the country. “It’s an astonishing experience,” said Pratt. “The actors are saying the words you wrote, and you can hear where things can be made better.”
“It’s a valuable tool,” said Barrett, who teaches theater and lectures at Curry College in Milton. “It lets the playwright hear what the play sounds like.”
Pratt’s goal is to get the play to full-production status. A talk-back with the audience is usually instructional. The actors can chime in too.
“If someone asks, ‘What the heck is going on’ at some point in the play,’’ Barrett said, then the playwright “hasn’t made it clear enough.”
“The Wright Place” is “semiautobiographical,” said Pratt. It centers on Pratt, her mother, and grandmother (names were changed in the play), and is set at her grandmother’s house in Cohasset where Pratt spent idyllic summer days.
“It was two miles from the ocean,” said Pratt. “It was a beautiful place.”
Esther Bates was aging but “she wanted to stay in that house as long as she lived,” said Jean Pratt, her daughter and Pratt’s mother. “We argued about that.”
Jean Pratt inherited the house when Bates died — in a nursing home — in 1989 at 93. Jean was 71. The house of memories for the Pratts had to be sold.
“Judith became anxious about selling it,” said Jean. “She wanted to find a way of keeping it. But it needed a lot of repairs. It was a big house, too much to take care of.”
It was sold to a Cohasset family.
However, Judith Pratt couldn’t get the house out of her mind, the pleasures it brought in her youth and, ultimately, the traumatic letting go.
“I started thinking about houses, people’s dream houses. I started working on the play in 2002,” she said. “When I finished it I said, ‘Mom, you’ve got to read this.’ She loved it, thank God.”
Pratt wanted to try acting when she was a Wayland High student. But there was no bona fide theater program. That changed when the school brought in acting students from Boston University who directed shows.
Pratt did some chorus singing but had difficulty landing key roles.
“Theater is a great leveler,” said Pratt, who took ballet lessons in Waltham when she was 9. She stayed close to the high school theater scene by building sets and handling props.
Finally, in her senior year, she landed the lead in “The Mad Woman of Chaillot.” When Pratt visited the new Wayland High for the first time, she was blown away by the state-of-the-art theater.
“I thought, ‘Where has this been all my life?’ ” she said.
Pratt had an early introduction to theater. “My parents started bringing me to the Vokes in the mid ’50s. I adored it.” By the time she got to Tufts University, she had caught, as theater people say, “the bug.” She majored in theater. She was getting roles.
“I played mostly older women,” she recalled.
She had to be made up for the part.
“Now when I go on stage, they don’t have to put lines’’ on her face, said Pratt, who is in her 60s.
Pratt went to New York after graduating in 1967. “That’s where you want to go for theater,” she said. She took acting classes, but significant roles were hard to come by. “I got little roles in teeny theaters.”
One blessing of the New York scene was meeting Susan Strausch, who remains a staunch friend. “We were in New York to seek our fortune,” recalled Strausch. Meanwhile, they did secretarial work and became roommates.
Strausch moved to Boston and Pratt soon followed. Pratt joined the Hub Theater Company that called the Old South Church home. “I got some good roles,” she said.
“Judith is so creative,” said Strausch, who lives in Hingham. “She gets ideas like bing, bing, bing, and develops them. She has a real creative mind. She can talk about anything. Name a subject and she can go on for an hour.
“Judith started out acting but always liked to write, then got into it full time in the ’90s.”
For the Vokes reading of “The Wright Place,” Barrett has grouped five women and two men who work at the theater and like to do plays.
“It wasn’t hard to find actors willing to volunteer their time,” he said. “It’s interesting to be part of an original production. We’re in the business of promoting theater in general.”
Judith Pratt has lived in Ithaca since 1983. She taught theater at Ithaca College from 1983 to 1990, but didn’t get tenure.
“I joined a playwriting group that met to ready plays. I got a sense that I could do that. Write plays,” she said.
She married Ithaca native Tom Bruce in 1988. Bruce had been a stage manager at the ART in Cambridge.
Pratt maintains a busy theater and writing life in Ithaca. She occasionally gets a role on stage.
With her mother living in Wayland and best friend in Hingham, visits to Massachusetts are eagerly anticipated.
“I’ll be at both readings at the Vokes,” said Strausch. So will Jean Pratt, a longtime Vokes subscriber.
Lenny Megliola can be reached at lennymegs@aol.com