Love Letters
Opening Night: September 18, 2014
Closing: December 14, 2014
Theater: Nederlander Theatre
Love Letters is a funny and emotional portrait about the powerful connection of love. Two friends, rebellious Melissa Gardner and straight-arrow Andrew Makepeace Ladd III have exchanged notes, cards and letters with each other for over 50 years. From second grade, through summer vacations, to college, and well into adulthood, they have spent a lifetime discussing their hopes and ambitions, dreams and disappointments, and victories and defeats. But long after the letters are done, the real question remains: Have they made the right choices or is the love of their life only a letter away?
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September 18, 2014
The dying art of putting pen to paper to exchange news is being celebrated on Broadway this fall. Love Letters, A. R. Gurney’s durable epistolary play, in which two actors sit on comfortable chairs onstage and read from the lifelong correspondence between a man and a woman from the East Coast upper crust, has made it to the big time, commercially speaking. A rotating cast of stars, beginning with Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow, will be taking the stage of the Brooks Atkinson Theater, where the production opened Thursday night under the expert direction of Gregory Mosher, to remind us that before emails and texts, before emoticons and emojis and Facebook and Instagram, people communicated their fondest hopes, their casual observations and their lame jokes on paper, with pen or pencil or perhaps a typewriter, and then stuffed the results into quaint things called mailboxes.
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September 18, 2014
A table, two chairs and a pair of actors reading from scripts on an otherwise bare stage sounds like one notch up from a radio play. But A.R. Gurney’s deceptively simple 1988 epistolary two-hander, Love Letters, is that rare work whose emotional richness requires no embellishment in order to become a full-bodied theatrical experience. All that’s needed are gifted actors capable of tracing the poignant thread of longing and regret that binds half a century of correspondence between characters whose relationship is thwarted by hesitation. And as the first couple in this production’s all-star rotating cast, Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow deliver with impeccable restraint.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 18, 2014
Dennehy, a two-time Tony winner, has been a steady presence on Broadway in the last few decades–and he brings a stalwart, hunched-over gravitas to Andrew, a self-serious young man who’s brief youthful indiscretions naturally give way to a Rockefeller-Republican conservatism. The real surprise here is Farrow, returning to the Main Stem for the first time in 18 years… She’s a real actress, and she uses her considerable tools and her wonderful voice to evoke Melissa’s girlish naivete, her teenage petulance, and then her grown-up insecurity… Love Letters reminds us that class can not only us in our place, but thwart any effort to forge real connections outside of ourselves.
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September 18, 2014
What’s the minimum requirement for putting on a play? Is it performers? Sets? Memorization? Surely, at a minimum, it’s acting, right? More than a quarter-century after Love Letters premiered, A.R. Gurney’s charming ditty of a play has landed on Broadway with virtually none of the characteristics of what you might expect in a play. While the script is clever, the thinness of the spectacle — which the author himself insisted upon — is sadly deflating, as if the audience is being asked to watch an early rehearsal instead of a polished jewel demanding $60 for even the worst seats.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 18, 2014
To truly appreciate all that Love Letters has to offer, just sit there and listen. A.R. Gurney’s 1988 drama, now enjoying a vibrant revival at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, has no set, so there’s not much in the way of distraction. Paired actors—Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow are up first, in a rotation of stars who will perform through winter—simply sit side-by-side at a table, reading from the playwright’s disarmingly funny script. There’s little for an audience member to do but stay motionless, perhaps close his eyes, and get carried away. If the epistolary drama is done well, you should be silently reminiscing about your own closest relationships, present and past, in no time.
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