Australian actor teams up with South Shore counterparts
Collaboration to stage the heart-warming and touching Love Letters
Australian actor and theatre producer Kath Perry has been welcomed into the Mahone
Bay theatre scene by wellknown local stars Jon Allen and Maureen Moffatt.
Perry was keen to put her successful overseas production of Love Letters by A.R. Gurney on locally while she was here visiting her family for a few months. “It is delightful to have been so well received and I’m excited that the play is about to open at the Mahone Bay Centre,” she said.
Love Letters is an evocative, heart-warming and touching story as two characters deliver funny and moving excerpts from the notes and letters, they sent to each other over their usually affectionate but often distant lives.
New Englanders Andrew Makepeace Ladd III (Jon Allen) and Melissa Gardner (Kath Perry) are childhood friends whose love story begins with birthday party thank-you notes and summer camp postcards. Romantically attached, but unable to understand their true feelings for each other, they live apart but continue to stay in touch throughout their grownup years.
Perry explains that “the play simply involves two tables, two chairs and two actors reading from letters on a bare stage. While this may make it seem more like radio than theatre, the emotional richness of the deceptively simple script means we travel with the characters through their longing and their love as they struggle with the fact that their lives have put so much time and distance between them. Texts, tweets and superficial socialmedia have now taken over our lives and letter writing has become a quaint relic of time gone by. This elegant drama takes us back through the wonder of resonance and romance,” she said.
Maureen Moffatt is the director of the production. “I have thoroughly enjoyed working with the two cast members in Love Letters,” she said. “It is an intimate experience and so creative a concept.”
Reviewed by the New York Times as ‘Deceptively simple and quietly moving’ Love Letters was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Productions
have had very famous American actors in the play since it was first presented in 1988. These include Julie Harris, Christopher Reeve, Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones. New York Broadway’s 2016 show starred Ali Macgraw and Ryan O’neal.
Love Letters will be presented at the Mahone Bay Centre at 45 School Street, Mahone Bay, on Sept. 6 and 7. Curtain time is 7:30 p.m. There is limited seating. Theatre goers are encouraged to arrive no later than 7:20 p.m. Tickets by cash only are $10 at the door. Wine and soft drinks will also be available.