Steel Beam's 'Fairways' tees up a love story

There are musicals about baseball ("Damn Yankees"), gambling ("Guys and Dolls") and even chess ("Chess"). But "Fairways," opening Friday at Steel Beam Theatre in St. Charles, may be the only one written about the venerable game of golf.

The relatively new musical was written by Prospect High School alum Mary Hutchings Reed and Curt Powell.

"I got the idea for the show a few years ago at a Lyric Opera benefit," Reed says. "As part of the fundraiser they were hitting plastic golf balls into the audience with numbers on them. I had never seen that on stage. I thought it was a fun image."

The image stayed with Reed, who divides her time between lawyering (for Winston and Strawn) and writing novels (she has finished eight so far and published one).

"I found myself in 2005 between novels," Reed says. "I had vanished one and was looking for something to do."

What she did was start exploring the image she had in her head of golfers on stage.

"I wrote the show in a few brief weeks," Reed says. "I started with a few songs I heard in my head. And then I realized I needed to put a story around it."

Reed, a golfer since her early 30s, had a lot to draw on.

"I love the game," she says. "And I am not a scratch player. You see it is a sport you play for life. But I think it is also a spiritual exercise. It requires you to get out of yourself.

"Most of their obstacles are internal," Reed says of her characters. "You can have a beautiful swing, watch that beautiful ball arc in the air, and you hit a sprinkler head and you end up in a trap."

The story that unfolded concerned two young people just learning the game from their more experienced parents, and the other golfers around them. "It is not a complex story," she says. "The young woman is learning. The young man is learning. And there is the love story between the young woman and the young man."

Once Reed finished her script, she knew she had to find a composer to add music to her lyrics. As luck would have it one of the women in her writers group had a husband who wrote music. She showed him the script and immediately, according to Reed, "he heard music in my words."

Reed and Powell worked together intensely, fusing music and words.

"It was a very cooperative and collaborative process," Reed says. "We did some rewriting."

She admits that a lot of help for shaping the show came from her sister, Donna Steele, founder of Steel Beam Theatre. "We had a couple of readings in the summer of 2005," Reed says, adding that rewrites were based on what they learned from the readings.

The show opened at Steel Beam in February of 2006. "It was one of Steel Beam's most successful shows," Reed says. "It helped it was set in the summer, so people could come in from the cold and see people dressed for warm weather." The show also appealed to an interesting cross-section of the public, attracting both theater fans and golfers.

The show was such a success that when Steele was putting together her 10th anniversary season, she decided she wanted to kick it off with "Fairways." "She heard a lot of people saying they wanted to do it again," Reed says.

Reed finds the prospect of reviving her show exciting. "We added a song," she says. "And of course this will be a new production, with new actors and new choreography. It will be fun to see a whole new take on the show."

• "Fairways" opens today and runs through Oct. 10 at the Steel Beam Theatre, 111 W. Main, St. Charles. For tickets call (630) 587-8521 or go to www.steelbeamtheatre.com.