'Tuesdays with Morrie,' Vincent P. Barras, come to St. Martinville

Sr. Martinville – Returning to the St. Martinville stage after a three-and-a-half-year absence, Vincent P. Barras, born and raised in St. Martinville, will be acting again on the DuChamp Opera House stage in “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom.

Performances are 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 10, and Saturday, Jan. 11, with a Sunday, Jan. 12, matinee at 2 p.m.

“I’ve always wanted to come back home to St. Martinville,” Barras said. He spent the first 17 years of his life in the town, and after college lived 15 more years with his parents, Nolan & Rhona Barras. He moved to Lafayette in 2009 and teaches at Lafayette High School.

“My very first play was actually as a replacement,” he remembered. “In 2002, the Evangeline Players were doing “Barefoot in the Park,” and they needed someone to replace the actor doing Victor Velasco, the dirty old man upstairs.”

Since then, he has either acted or directed a dozen productions on the Opera House floor, the last of which was a Firelight production of “Oliver!” in July 2010.

Forty months later, Barras returns as the iconic 78-year-old Professor Morrie Schwartz, a beloved Sociology professor at Brandeis University. “Tuesdays with Morrie” is a poignant tale of Morrie’s battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease and the former college student, now sports reporter Mitch Albom, who decides to meet him every Tuesday until the end. As one of the lines in the script goes, the play is about “love, work, aging, family, community, forgiveness, and death.”

“To date, it’s my favorite role – and certainly the one I’ve gotten to play the most,” Barras said.

The Eunice Players’ Theatre performed the play in September of last year, followed by a weekend run sponsored by Acting Unlimited, Inc., at Theatre 810 in October. Barras was in both productions, though with different actors: Wesley Saunders played the part of Mitch in Eunice, and Travis Fontenot took over in Lafayette.

Fontenot, a teacher and director of the theatre program at Pine Prairie High school, again plays Mitch Albom, the other half of the two-man play.

“This was my first lead role, and it convinced me to pursue an acting career,” Fontenot said.

He will audition for various graduate school programs in theatre in late January in New York City.

Tickets for the three performances are $10 and can be arranged by calling the DuChamp Opera House at 394-6604.

“I have a lot of friends in St. Martinville who have given so much to me,” Barras said. “I just wanted to give something back.”