Doreen Breault: Getting Her Act Together
Doreen Breault can check an item off her bucket list: acting. There was a time, she never thought that she would be able to do that.
Doreen is appearing in Wit a la Carte 2017, an evening of humorous sketches and scenes produced by Joyce Beauvais for Ivoryton Players, on Friday and Saturday, June 16 and 17 at the Centerbrook Meeting House.
“I like to do comedies; that is what my groups are know for,” Beauvais notes. “I love for there to be laughter in rehearsals as well as from our audiences.”
The current production features a potpourri of scenes from iconic playwrights like Noel Coward, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, and Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, best known as the team that wrote My Fair Lady.
Doreen is featured in a Lerner and Loewe offering in Wit a La Carte, though it comes from another of the team’s classics, the movie Gigi. Doreen and Rick Holloway will perform the duet, “I Remember It Well,” done in the original movie by Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold. The laughs come because each remembers it completely differently.
Doreen is one of the founding members of the Ivoryton troupe, whose actors come from several towns along the shoreline, though she had never acted before she joined.
“She has turned into a really gifted actor and comedienne,” said Beauvais. “She is a natural—but she works hard and is dedicated.”
Growing up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Doreen had little exposure to theater or any of the performing arts.
“Pawtucket is a blue collar city and arts were not big. In high school, we had no arts at all,” she said.
Still, she loved theater and as an adult had long attended productions at the Ivoryton Playhouse. She never, however, expected to be in a production herself, until in one of the theater’s email blasts, she learned about the formation of the Ivoryton Players group. That email coincided with her involvement in theater as a member of the boosters club for productions at Valley Regional High School. Her daughter Rachel, now a student at the University of Connecticut, was then involved in drama productions at Valley Regional.
“When I saw Joyce’s memo, I thought that now I could do something, too,” Doreen recalls.
She went to the first meeting of the Ivoryton Players, and found herself a bit cowed by the number of people with theatrical experience. Her own drama background consisted of writing and performing a play in the 6th grade. In the first production, Neil Simon’s Fools, Doreen worked on the technical crew, but since then she has had onstage roles, among them playing a Russian spy in See How They Run, Sarah the maid in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Dolly Levi in a scene from Hello, Dolly!
Some of the accents she has had to learn have been easier than others. The Russian intonation for the spy came with no trouble.
“Maybe because I watched Get Smart,” she says referring to the old TV spy spoof.
Her French accent, necessary in the upcoming Gigi piece, is reasonable, but the British still challenges her.
“I’ve struggled with it, but its getting better,” she says. She adds that her native Rhode Island accent makes it relatively easy for her to adapt to other distinctive American voices.
“I can do Boston and New York,” she says. “Dolly Levi was no problem.”
The troupe, ranging from members who have had considerable theatrical experience to complete novices, has been very supportive of all its members.
“Everybody was so welcoming, and encouraging,” Doreen says. “Nobody was made to feel inferior.”
The productions are staged readings, so actors can use scripts, but Doreen, like many of the performers, tries to memorize much of the material so she can look at the audience rather than the script.
Doreen says stage fright has not been a big problem for her.
“I was a little intimidated, but not total stage fright,” she says.
She credits her job after college in human resources, which involved talking to different groups, doing orientations and business presentations. In addition, she has sung in the choir of St. John’s Church in Old Saybrook since 1989.
Doreen has long been involved with St. John’s and its school, which her three children attended. Next year, she will take over as the school’s office administrator. Over the three decades in which she and her husband Bob have lived in the shoreline area, she has resided in Clinton, Deep River, and Ivoryton, but wherever she has been, St. John’s has remained central part of her life.
Doreen is an enthusiastic gardener and does all her shrubs and plantings herself, buying as much as she can at the local garden club’s May market. She is also a regular at the Ivoryton Farmer’s Market, and at local outdoor concerts. In addition to attending performances at the Ivoryton Playhouse, for several years she has also volunteered as an usher.
With two sons who have graduated from Villanova University and a daughter now entering her sophomore year at in college, Doreen and Bob are in a familiar state for modern parents: somewhere between empty nesters and returning adult children. Doreen’s eldest son and his wife expect a first grandchild for her and her husband in the fall.
Doreen says that the audiences for the Ivoryton Players have continued to grow.
“The first show was mostly friends and family, but by the time we did The Man Who Came to Dinner, I was shocked when I looked out and saw the audience was filled,” she says.
She always has a goal for her own performances, all of which have been in comedies.
“I want to get a laugh,” she says. “It’s intimidating if no one laughs.”
The Ivoryton Players presents Wit a la Carte 2017 on Friday, June 16, at 7 p.m. and Saturday, June 17, at 1 p.m. at the Centerbrook Meeting House, 51 Main Street, Centerbrook. Tickets are available at the door or call the Ivoryton Playhouse Box Office at 860-767-7318.