Gross, Baxter to deliver Love Letters just in time for Valentine’s Day
BENEFIT PERFORMANCE FOR NM ACTORS LAB
Santa Feans have a new option for celebrating Valentine’s Day this year, thanks to one of television’s iconic couples — Elyse and Steven Keaton from the 1980s hit Family Ties — and the actors who played them — Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross. They’ll be here to give four performances of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, benefiting New Mexico Actors Lab, from Thursday, Feb. 10, to Sunday, Feb. 13. The final performance includes a post-show, meet-the-cast reception.
“This is our inaugural benefit performance,” says Robert Benedetti, the distinguished director and acting teacher who founded Actors Lab in 2012. “It’s great timing for us, offering Love Letters in conjunction with Valentine’s Day and having it as the kick-off event for our 2022 season, which we’ll announce at the performances.”
For Benedetti, it’s also a chance to showcase the work of a distinguished student — Gross earned an MFA in 1973 from the Yale University School of Drama, where Benedetti chaired the acting program. Almost 50 years later their mutual respect and affection is still readily apparent. Gross remembers that his teachers fell into one of two broad categories: “Those who insist the best results are achieved by tearing their students apart, and those who challenge their students in encouraging and nurturing ways. Beny [Benedetti’s nickname] was most definitely the latter.”
For Benedetti, Gross was “one of the very best in a very good group of students. It was a diverse class and an older one than you might expect,” he says, “That’s in part because the GI Bill was still in place. In addition to being an accomplished actor, Michael also had a real commitment
to engagement with the community.” The fact that Love Letters is a fundraiser for Actors Lab reflects Gross’s sense of community — the part-time Santa Fean approached Benedetti to offer his services, then persuaded Baxter to participate pro bono. As the play’s title suggests, Love Letters is an epistolary work, a common form in novels but unusual in drama. It traces the attraction that never quite leads to a fully realized relationship between Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III via their five-decade correspondence, from summer camp postcards to Andrew’s final letter after Melissa’s death. Both were born into prosperous East Coast families (despite Ladd’s panoramic moniker, Gardner’s is the wealthier) and both experience rich helpings of life’s vicissitudes over the play’s 90-minute span.
Gurney, who died in 2017, was a prolific author whose primary focus was aptly described as “penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat” by The Wall Street Journal a year earlier. His best-known plays are 1981’s The Dining Room and 1988’s Love Letters; the latter is undoubtedly the most modestly scaled piece ever to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, requiring just two actors, no set, minimal furniture, and no memorization of lines.
That simplicity doesn’t mean it’s not potent theater. In the years since its premiere Love Letters acquired an undeserved reputation as a fluff piece, probably because, as Gross points out, “sometimes it’s performed by actors and sometimes by personalities.” A 2014 Broadway revival reminded critics and audiences of its virtues. The Wall Street Journal called it “one of Mr. Gurney’s best plays ... you come to know [the characters] so well that their parallel sorrows seem as familiar as your own,” and a 2020 London staging had the same effect on British reviewers, with The Times’ critic saying of it, “Long before the end I was charmed.”
Love Letters is undoubtedly the most modestly scaled piece ever to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, requiring just two actors, no set, minimal furniture, and no memorization of lines.
Baxter and Gross, who share the same birth date, became close friends during Family Ties’ seven-season run from 1982 to 1989. The show’s central dynamic was the relationship between the parents, both ex-hippies and still very liberal, and their eldest child, Alex (Michael J. Fox), a money-mad, briefcase-toting young Republican.
The duo has performed Love Letters many times over the fourdecade span since the sitcom ended. “We started in 1989 or 1990 at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills,” Gross says, “and later toured eastern and southern theaters with it. We also had a couple of runs at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania. We’ll emphasize and de-emphasize things each time we revisit it, based on how we’ve grown and changed. It’s always fresh because we aren’t doing this constantly.”
While the scope of the production may be small, it has an epic aspect for the actors. “I love Love Letters because it feels like a novel,” Gross says. “It’s a great sweep of history for us, a lifetime on the stage.” One aspect of Gurney’s script has recently acquired new resonance for Gross. “These are two very different people who somehow managed to stay extremely close. That’s a critically important message to put forward at this time.”
It’s a message that also resonates for Benedetti. Actors Lab’s first 2022 production will be a big-cast classic from the late 1930s, one that he says, “depicts a warmer, more loving America. It shows us what the country used to be like at a time when there was political division, but it could be discussed and disagreed on with mutual respect.”