‘Floating Palace’ reminiscent of showboat era comedies

Husband-and-wife filmmakers Glen Pitre and Michelle Benoit have never written any plays that have been staged.

They and theater director Perry Martin are old friends, but the three have never formally collaborated on a project.

All that is history now. In May, Martin is directing the premiere of “Floating Palace,” written by Pitre and Benoit, at Martin’s new Bayou Playhouse in Lockport.

Pitre, the director of the south-Louisiana-set “Belizaire the Cajun” and “The Scoundrel’s Wife,” had not worked in theater in 20 years.

“I know movies,” he said. “Theater is not a pond we’ve fished in.”

The idea of putting on “Floating Palace” happened when Martin asked Pitre whether he had any viable scripts in hand. Voila! “Floating Palace,” the stage comedy, was born:

It’s the waning days of the time of showboats and vaudeville. A 1920’s-era showboat runs aground in a Louisiana bayou near a town similar to – not surprisingly – Lockport. The put-upon owner is forced to ply whatever charm he has on the townspeople to keep his shows running and stocked with actors.

Pitre and Benoit wrote “Palace” to be a movie, but producers were not keen on a script set many decades ago, Pitre said. The variety show and dance elements would not translate into what producers wanted, but made the script good for the stage.

Regardless, producing the movie independently would have been too expensive. The cost of renting a showboat to use in the filming would probably have been prohibitive, Pitre said.

“The screenplay is one of many screenwriters write that are not made,” he said. “It’s theatrical, a love song to show biz. Translating the screenplay to the theater takes a lot of hours but it was seamless.”

“When Perry came along, it just jumped off the page,” he said. “After you’ve done it for years, you could tell we can pull it off.”

“It’s a chance to be silly,” Pitre said, “a chance for Michelle and me to continue our two loves: this area and the act of performance in storytelling.”

“Palace” is as much a billet doux to the zaniness of vaudeville as anything else, an excuse to put on for the crowd a bunch of often cornball entertainment and bare-bones musical numbers.

Magic, juggling, burlesque and melodrama are all part of the script and the audience is sometimes egged on to participate.

“We’re using the actual audience in the theater as the audience for the play within the play,” Pitre said. “Vaudeville performers used to work the crowd. It’s a lot more interactive than most plays. The fourth wall-the invisible one-between the stage and the audience is broken.”

The set is light on decoration. Acts move on and off briskly.

The owner of the boat (played by Ryan Reinike) had dreamed of owning the best showboat around, but needed to spend all his money to buy it; the vessel winds up being leaky.

His actors quit because he can’t pay them. The owner marries the resident diva (Ani Ashley) to keep her onboard, and the two are forced to play all the roles in the boat’s vaudeville acts. He’s a magician, she’s sawed in half. She’s a burlesque queen dancing to a scratchy Victrola. He plays both the hero and the villain in another act.

The desperate but determined owner romances the town’s piano teacher and the farmer’s daughter to get them to be part of the cast.

“The theme is, ‘Life is short. Follow your dream,'” Pitre said. “We’ve dealt with weightier subjects. This is for fun.”

Martin called “Palace” a two-man show.

Both Reinike and Ashley have acted in theater in New York City. Reinike was the first actor to appear on the Bayou Playhouse stage when the theater opened last year with “Mirrors of Chartres Street: Faulkner in New Orleans/New Orleans in Faulkner.” Ashley appeared last in Le Petit Theater de Terrebonne’s “Doubt.”

Also in the cast are Sara Goodrum, Heather Keller, Alces Adams and Lois Duet.

The germ for the play goes back to when Pitre recorded oral histories for the Terrebonne Parish Library and the Library of Congress in the early 1980s. The elderly people he interviewed could recall showboats coming to Dulac before the first movie theaters arrived. They heard rumors about the boat’s piano player having affairs.

“I thought, ‘There’s a play there,'” Pitre said. “What it meant to a little town to have the outside world come in.”

Pitre has attended several rehearsals and said he is awed by Martin’s directing. The difference between movies and theater, he explained, is films can be edited to cut out scenes that don’t work, and to build up sections that do.

“It’s kind of backward,” Pitre said.

Any problem in a play, of course, has to be dealt with in rehearsal.

“Reality onstage is different than in film,” he said.

Pitre’s wife has taught film directing at the University of New Orleans and Nicholls State University, but has since focused mainly on movie production.

He said he was glad to be able to work with her. The two have collaborated on novels, nonfiction, documentaries and other screenplays, but they still don’t always get to work together often.

But writing “Floating Palace” was a doozie.

“It’s silly, silly, silly,” Pitre said. “If you don’t want to laugh, stay home.”

The Bayou Playhouse is located at 101 Main St. “Floating Palace” is running May 15 to June 13 every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Showtimes are at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 2:30 p.m. on Sundays.

The playhouse is screening one of Glen Pitre’s movies following each Sunday performance: May 17, “La Fievre Jaune & Huit Piastres et Demie;” May 24, “Belizaire the Cajun;” May 31, “Haunted Waters and Good for What Ails You;” June 7, “The Scoundrel’s Wife;” June 14, “The Man Who Came Back.”

Call 1-888-99-BAYOU (22968) for ticket information or e-mail info@bayouplayhouse.com.

Cast members Heather Keller (seated), Sara Goodrum, Ryan Reinike and Ani Ashley rehearse a scene from “Floating Palace,” which opens this month at the Bayou Playhouse in Lockport.