50 years of love & not one glance
YOU can see why everyone loves doing “Love Letters”: A.R. Gurney’s 1988 play requires no special set or costumes, and the cast of two, reading from scripts, doesn’t need to memorize lines.
Now the show’s back on Broadway, with a cavalcade of stars taking turns over the coming weeks, beginning with Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow.
On the surface the plot is banal as can be, tracking the relationship between Farrow’s Melissa Gardner and Dennehy’s Andrew Makepeace Ladd III from their meeting as children to the death of one of them nearly f ive decades later.
Their story is told exclusively via their letters to each other. Melissa and Andy spend the entire show sitting shoulder to shoulder behind a large wooden table, but their gazes don’t cross. They are close but not together, which pretty much sums up their shared history.
After meeting in the second grade, the pair are hardly ever in the same city. Over the years they update each other the old fashioned way: by putting pen to paper.
An artist and a rebel, Melissa has a hard time f inding her bearings — her wealthy parents have divorced and remarried, her own marriage is a failure and she battles addiction.
Andy is more grounded, and more driven. He attends Yale, joins the Navy, enrolls at Harvard Law, starts a family and winds up in Congress.
As craftily written as “Love Letters” is, it’s also static: There’s not much director Gregory Mosher can do with this setup. The show lives or dies by its actors. Surprisingly, Farrow — who has considerably less stage experience than Dennehy — is the stronger performer. She looks slightly nerdy, as if she hasn’t changed her eyeglasses since the 1980s, and still has a waif ish, diff ident presence. Yet she also easily handles Melissa’s flip, seemingly insouciant personality, as when blithely dismissing one of her friend’s letters: “I guess you have a lot of interesting things to say, Andy, but some of them are not terribly interesting to me.”
Granted, Melissa is more colorful — she goes through a greater variety of emotions, and has all the good lines. But Dennehy’s Andy remains pretty much the same throughout, while Farrow subtly suggests the arc from child to teen to college student to grown woman. It should be fun to see how her replacements — who include Diana Rigg and Anjelica Huston — will step up to the challenge.