The Purple Rose Theatre is a starting point for many creative artists and for Matt Letscher it was his ticket to California and Hollywood. But it was not a one-way ticket for the actor/playwright, whose play “Bert & Trixie Visit the Vet” is making its world premiere at the popular Chelsea theatre.
Letscher, who grew up in Grosse Pointe and attended Grosse Pointe South HS, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1992 and has lived in Southern California for 33 years. He is glad to be back home in Michigan with a new play in hand – and is even more excited to be walking into the Purple Rose where this journey first began more than three decades ago.
“The year I graduated from U-M was the second year of The Purple Rose and that summer I got a part in ‘Tropical Pickle,’ a play written by Jeff Daniels,” he said. “It was a living room farce and really a fun play. It was a big hit for the theater and gave me my first professional job in an Equity theater that summer. And that’s how I got started.”
Letscher, just 22 at the time, packed up the car and headed west – with Jeff Daniels riding shotgun, sort of.
“Through that show at the Purple Rose, I got a little part in the movie ‘Gettysburg’ that Jeff was in the fall afterwards,” he said. “To say I got lucky starting out is really a massive understatement. I was on that movie set for about a month. I mean, I was a glorified extra, but I did have a couple of lines and it gave me my entry into the union and all that. As soon as that movie was done, which was October of 92, I basically packed up the car and headed out to LA. And I continued to get lucky.”
While luck may have come up 7s and 11s a few times, it was Letscher’s “natural” talent that really was the reason for his success. And it was that talent that landed him a prominent role on the CBS sitcom “Almost Perfect” that ran from September 1995 to October 1996 and featured 34 episodes.
“It was the first network TV show for Nancy Travis, and it was a TV show about a TV show,” he said. “I played Rob Paley, the young, you know, surprise, surprise, the young kid from the Midwest who was kind of dopey and easily, you know, gullible. It was the Woody Harrelson part, essentially.
Like the stage at The Purple Rose and the “Gettysburg” movie set, it was another school playground for the young and promising actor. “I learned a lot on that show,” he said. “I was working with some incredible writers and a great cast.”
The writing part of Letscher’s resume began on the set of the Daniels’ movie “Super Sucker.”
“Jeff and I spent a lot of time together on set, and we started doing this dumb bit where we all pretended we were sort of like an Ed Wood kind of troupe of actors who all talked like Bette Davis,” he said. “We would just go back and forth on set and we had a lot of fun with it,” he said. “Sometime after that he said he was trying to write a play about these idiots we were playing around on set and asked me to write it. And that was the first time anybody had said anything like that to me in terms of having faith in what I could do as a writer.”
In 2006 that play, called “Sea of Fools,” made it to The Purple Rose stage.
More success with the pen would soon follow. In 2015, his play “Gaps in the Fossil Record” received the 2015 Edgerton Foundation’s New Play Award for its production at The Purple Rose, and in 2025, his play, “Demolition,” garnered the 2025 StageRaw Award for Best Playwriting after an extended run in Los Angeles.
And it’s Letscher’s writing that highlights his Michigan return in the summer of 2025 with The Purple Rose’s final production of their 34th season, “Bert & Trixie Visit the Vet.” The play, about four pets in a veterinarian’s waiting room who plan an escape when they suspect one of them is in danger, is a comedy about what it means to truly be free – something Letscher can relate to in his successful creative journey that began in Washtenaw County.
“The Purple Rose is a very special place,” he says. “They are focused on producing and promoting new plays by emerging playwrights. They strive to promote new works in the American theater and there are very few theaters that do that. But it’s part of their mission. I don’t really have enough superlatives to describe how well they take care of their writers and their actors. It just feels like you’re working at a highly professional level and it feels no different than being on Broadway. It’s the kind of place you want to be.”
Letscher’s new play will be there from June 20 through Aug. 31. Tickets are available now at The Purple Rose box office and online.
Coming Soon: Four Pets Escaping the Vet in Purple Rose Theatre’s Summer Comedy
