Love Letters
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Cititour.com Review
Why isn’t A.R. Gurney as revered a playwright as, say, Edward Albee? Both have drawn heavily on their upper-class WASP upbringings, but Gurney demonstrates much more open affection for his creations and their foibles, while Albee tends toward the arch and intellectual — traits to which critics often attach greater importance. However, the current revival of Gurney’s two-hander Love Letters, 25 years after it first came to Broadway, shows just how incisive and insightful a conveyer of character he is, and how, like Albee, he can play with form and structure without cheapening his story.
Love Letters is, in fact, about the conflict between intellect and emotion, played out in the correspondence between Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, two childhood friends who continue to write to each other for 50 years, beginning in the 1930s. (A bevy of stars are part of the rotating cast, including Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow, who played Andy and Melissa during press performances.)
Throughout, the actors sit at a table and face the audience as they read their “letters” from scripts. These range from cute, short notes and cards their parents forced them to write when they were children to longer, deeper reflections. As they grow up, flirt, marry other people and face life’s woes, the correspondence frequently slows down, but they always reconnect. High-strung, artistic and needy, Melissa, like her parents, struggles with alcoholism, while steady and reliable Andy graduates from Yale and eventually enters politics.
The bare-bones staging doesn’t mean Gregory Mosher’s production is scant in other areas. Farrow plumbs deep emotional reservoirs as the fragile Melissa grows into a damaged, self-hating adult, and Dennehy, whose role is more about restraint, depicts Andy’s longing to break free of the seemingly model life he’s ensconced in by carefully hinting at the yearning beneath the reserve.
Likewise, Gurney deftly teases out the details of their lives as much through what they don’t tell each other as what they do: Teenage Melissa’s trip to California to visit her father and his new family, for example, and Andy time in Japan with a girlfriend when he’s in the service are never colored in.
It doesn’t feel as if anything’s missing, though. In an early letter to Melissa, Andy quotes his father by writing that “letters are a way of presenting yourself in the best possible light to another person.” Written communication has been irrevocably altered in the last quarter century, but Gurney’s words retain their power to glimpse into these aching souls while we wonder if a few words more or less could have altered the course of their lives.
By Diane Snyder
Visit the Site
http://lovelettersbroadway.com
Cast
Rotating casts for this two-character show include Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow (Sept. 13 to Oct. 10), Carol Burnett and Brian Dennehy (Oct. 11 to Nov. 7), Alan Alda and Candice Bergen (Nov. 8 to Dec. 5), Stacy Keach and Diana Rigg (Dec. 6 to Jan. 9) and Anjelica Huston and Martin Sheen (Jan. 10 to Feb. 1).
Open/Close Dates
Opening 9/13/2014
Closing 12/14/2014
Box Office
800-745-3000
Theatre Info
Brooks Atkinson Theatre
256 West 47th Street
New York, NY 10036
Map
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