‘Love Letters’ captures push, pull of long distance
Stage veterans shine as separated couple in underappreciated play
Even as he tries explaining why he loves writing letters, Andrew Makepeace Ladd III admits that “it’s a dying art.”
Those words were written by playwright A.R. Gurney nearly 30 years ago; Andy, one of the two characters in Gurney’s “Love Letters,” puts them in a letter written more than 70 years ago. How can a play involving two characters reading from 50-plus years of exchanged letters still resonate, in our post-literate age of instant texts and tweets?
The answer was driven home for me Friday night, as it is every time I see this oft-performed but nevertheless underappreciated play, a onetime finalist for the Pulitzer.
And that’s because the play’s letters ingeniously capture what’s frequently true of people in love: Whether it entails holding a pen to paper or using thumbs to text, their writing simultaneously fosters intimacy and creates distance, bringing them together while also keeping them apart.
Staged by the Milwaukee Entertainment Group under the direction of Zach Thomas Woods, this latest iteration of “Love Letters” features stage veterans Tom Marks and Gladys Rhodes Chmiel, embodying WASPs Andy and Melissa from their first written exchange as 1937 second-graders through the late 1980s.
Even when these two are children, Andy is the prim and proper one, dutifully obeying his parents while taking the first steps down a straight and narrow path that leads to Yale, Harvard Law School, military service and an eventual career as a U.S. senator.
It’s Andy more than Melissa who wants to write letters, and Marks helps us see why: They give this pent-up and buttoned-down man a means of expressing on paper all he isn’t getting from his blueprint suburban life and comfortable but passionless marriage.
“I feel like a true lover when I’m writing you,” Andy says in one of his warmest letters to Melissa, the great love of his life. Marks reads these words with deep emotion, conveying through his voice what he won’t show in his poker face or stiff body.
Meanwhile, the more impulsive Melissa is careening through a life with too much booze and too many men, too few options and too little love.
Melissa urges Andy to write letters that truly express all he feels while revealing something of himself; Chmiel’s more emotive Melissa does both — often leaving her exposed and hurt. As Melissa’s mistakes catch up with her, Chmiel chronicles the consequences, giving us a woman who morphs from feisty and flirty to desperate and desolate.
And nostalgic. Both of these actors have been performing for a long time; not surprisingly, they’re at their best following intermission, as their characters grow older and look back on all they might have been, if they’d actually come together instead of living their love through their letters.
“Love Letters” continues through Feb. 25 at the Brumder Mansion, 3046 W. Wisconsin Ave. For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/ event/2825515. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.