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Joyce Beauvais: All The World’s a Stage

Joyce Beauvais got her first acting job at the age of seven in a television commercial. By the time she was eight, she had asked her father to write a play for her to star in, and it has been theater ever since.

Joyce, the founder of the Ivoryton Players, is directing the group in its upcoming production, See How They Run, a farce by Philip King set in post-World War II England on Saturday, Nov. 19 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 20 at 2 p.m. at the Deep River Town Hall Theater. Tickets are available through the Ivoryton Playhouse. The Deep River Town Hall Theater is on the third floor of town hall and is accessible by elevator.

At recent rehearsal, Joyce was urging the theatrical troupe to speed up the pace of the action.

“This is farce,” she said. “It has to move fast, the jokes have to keep coming.”

Turning to a visitor, she explained, “There is nothing zanier than an old-fashioned farce and a British vicarage is a perfect setting for the zaniness.”

The Ivoryton Players are a varied group of performers, some who have experience in community and professional theater, some who have never acted before joining the group. Most performers come from the shoreline area, but others travel from as far away as West Hartford and Norwich. Joyce also directs groups in East Lyme as and at both Essex Meadows and Chester Village West.

“I love working with seniors, and now I am a senior myself,” she says.

All actors in Joyce’s productions use scripts.

“That’s the hook: no memorization,” she says. “Some people do memorize, but it is not something you have to do because the audience stops noticing you have a script.”

Joyce, who grew up in the Belmont, Massachusetts, performed so regularly in local productions that she had earned her Actor’s Equity card by the age of 15. There was no family pressure to act.

“I didn’t have a stage mother. It was all me,” she says of her determination to make a career on stage.

Since she was a child actor, one of Joyce’s trademarks has been her vibrant red hair. She says even her earliest reviews talked about her flowing red locks. They are still red, but Joyce says that it is now henna that keeps them that way.

“I never use chemical products,” she explains.

Joyce did summer stock productions throughout New England from the age of 11, but once she graduated from the Boston Conservatory with a major in theater and a minor in dance, she headed for New York and got herself both an agent and a husband, whom she had met acting in summer stock. While her then-husband finished college at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Joyce took a detour from Broadway to perform as an historical role player on Jamestown Island.

Returning to New York, Joyce didn’t have trouble getting roles in commercials and soap operas, but her goal was always to act in live theater productions. She recalls not only all the live performances that went well but also the inevitable glitches that live performance produces. Once, making an entrance in high heels, one of her shoes stuck in the threshold.

“I did the whole scene with one shoe off,” she recalls.

Another time, performing in There’s a Girl in My Soup at a Florida dinner theater, Joyce recalls a patron who had too much to drink and how he almost ruined an entire comedy scene, which took 10 minutes to build up to a joke about a lady’s glove under a pillow. But soon after the scene started, the patron ruined the surprise. He shouted out that the glove was under the pillow. When the actors finally got to the place where the location of the glove should have been revealed for the first time, Joyce recalls that the audience laughed anyway.

Joyce was so interested in live performance that she muffed a plum movie opportunity early in her career. Her agent directed her to a call for a movie casting up in the Bronx. She was unenthusiastic about doing a movie but went anyway. Nonetheless, she remembers that she was called back for a second audition, with only one other actress to beat out for the role. Joyce was unaware of what the movie was but the other actress was prepared for the occasion and had studied for the part.

“She had done her homework and she cared,” Joyce recalls.

The other performer got the part. Only later did Joyce learn that it was Diane Keaton and the movie was The Godfather.

“It took me a while to admit I had made a mistake,” Joyce says.

Joyce wanted not only to act, but also to produce and direct.

“People were not interested in those days in women producers and directors,” she says.

Instead, in the mid-1980s with agent Jack Rollins, she opened her own supper club, Chez Beauvais on 10th Avenue and 56th Street in Manhattan. Around the corner from the location of CBS, Joyce remembers events like a birthday party at Chez Beauvais for Dan Rather.

Chez Beauvais produced more enthusiasm that profit. After some six years, Joyce called it quits.

“We made a decision to close before we got into real financial trouble,” she says. “But people remember Chez Beauvais. It was wonderful time.”

Joyce moved to Florida, where she worked as a banquet and event planner, and as an activities director at a number of hotels and retirement homes. She had just started her own limousine service when two things happened simultaneously: She got celiac disease and the recession of 2008 hit.

“I think of that service as a precursor to Uber. It would have worked and I would have figured it out if I hadn’t gotten so sick and then the recession,” she recalls.

She came back to New England three ago.

“I never wanted to be cold again, but I should have left Florida much sooner. That’s the honest truth. I love the people here,” Joyce says.

She also loved the Ivoryton Playhouse, and wrote to Executive Director Jacqueline Hubbard about starting an amateur group under its aegis.

“I felt at home the minute I walked into the playhouse,” she says. “Jacqui liked the concept and gave me the opportunity to do this. I feel very lucky.”

She is proud of the progress the members of the Ivoryton players have made over the span of the troupe’s existence.

“People have really grown. I don’t think we could have done this play three years ago,” she says of the upcoming production of See How They Run.

Joyce has a clear vision what the group’s goal should be: amusement for everybody.

“It should be fun for the players and fun for the audience too,” she says.

The Ivoryton Players in See How They Run

Saturday, Nov. 19 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 20 at 2 p.m. at the Deep River Town Hall Theater, 174 Main Street, Deep River. For tickets, call the Ivoryton Playhouse Box Office at 860-767-7318. For more information about the performance, visit www.ivoryton-players.com. To find out about joining the Ivoryton Players, email shorelinedrama@gmail.com.