Thirty Years of Friendship, One FAMOUS Story
Thirty years ago, a young actor and an emerging director met in a tumultuous New York rehearsal room. What began as a challenging chapter in their early careers sparked an enduring friendship, and, decades later, the inspiration for FAMOUS.
Written and performed by Sandra Bauleo and co-conceived with director Thomas Caruso, FAMOUS transforms Sandra’s extraordinary real-life experience with a Hollywood legend into a funny, heartfelt exploration of ambition, identity and the complicated pressures of life in the spotlight. As QCT prepares to welcome this developing new work to the Black Box Theatre, Sandra and Thomas share how the story found its way to the stage, why Quincy is an important stop on its journey and what they hope audiences take away from it. If you don’t have your tickets yet, get yours here!
Sandra
FAMOUS is drawn from an extraordinary chapter of your own life. When did you realize this experience was the perfect concept for a play?
It wasn’t until many years later when, as I mention in the play, Tom and I would be asked how we met. And our response would always cause people to be extremely intrigued, and they would ask us a bunch of questions. And they would be so entertained and enthralled with our answers! So after a while we thought, maybe this is a fun story for anyone to hear.
Quincy audiences will be among the first to experience FAMOUS as it continues toward a New York production. What do you hope they’ll be talking about on the way home?
I hope they will come away with some insight into what an artist goes through just to be able to have a chance to do what they love to do. And the lessons we might learn in finding grace for navigating through those difficult obstacles. No one is ever perfect. But what happens when the world expects you to be perfect? Or to always look a certain way or to be forever young? What does that pressure do to you? That’s especially true for women, not just in the arts but in life.
Because FAMOUS is a true story, were there moments when you felt pressure to soften or alter what happened, or was the truth simply too good to change?
What was really important for us was being honest. And making sure we were as accurate as we could possibly be with our memory of something that happened thirty years ago. Then there was the idea of protecting people. Respecting them was very important. We never wanted this to be a salacious story. A tell-all, gossipy story. We wanted to tell our story as a play. So you have to really think about how to thread the stories together. And I think that may always lead you to have to gently tweak something here or there. But it is very, very much based on our true experiences.
Thomas
Your career has taken you from Broadway and Off-Broadway to regional theatres and international tours. What have you brought from those experiences to the development of FAMOUS?
The inspiration for FAMOUS came 30 years ago when I first met Sandra. It was the beginning of both of our careers. I was a young director just trying to navigate the world of New York, and I barely knew how to survive, never mind trying to be a theatre artist. Sandra and I bonded during a tumultuous and challenging time in a rehearsal room because of her self-deprecating humor and keen intuition about human behavior. I have been fortunate to work with many wonderful artists on Broadway and around the country over the past 30 years and hone my directorial skills developing both new plays and new musicals. I think deep down I always thought that Sandra’s incredibly funny and heartfelt story would make a fantastic play, but it took years of developmental experience to finally figure out how we might tell it in a compelling way.
You have been a mentor to QCT’s Artistic Director Ethan Nienaber. What is it like to reconnect through FAMOUS and bring this project to the theatre he now leads?
Ethan is such a gifted theatre director and all-around amazing person. I have loved working with him on many projects in New York City and on tour over the years. Currently, there are limited resources around the country when it comes to the development of new plays, and Ethan has provided us with such a gift by inviting Sandra and me to QCT to further develop and learn about our show. We are so excited to meet the QCT audiences and make the play stronger based on their feedback. It’s strong artistic leaders like Ethan who help the theatre by giving opportunities to new works that could become classics someday.
The Black Box places audiences close to the performer and the action. How does that intimacy shape the way you’ve staged FAMOUS?
I love working in intimate black box spaces, and FAMOUS is the perfect play for this style of storytelling. Sandra embodies over a dozen distinct characters during her show, and hopefully the audience will feel like they are an integral part of her story and that she’s letting them all in on a secret…truly up close and personal.