Thirteen years after his beautifully constructed Animals Out of Paper, playwright Rajiv Joseph continues the journey of one of that play’s characters with the moody, melancholic Letters of Suresh, now off-Broadway at Second Stage.
Letters is a companion piece rather than a sequel, a collection of monologues that attempts to link a disparate group of people—Suresh (Ramiz Monsef), Melody (Ali Ahn), Amelia (Kellie Overbey), and Father Hashimoto (Thom Sesma)—through little more than the power of the written word. There are other connections, some more tenuous than others: Father Hashimoto is Melody’s great-uncle, though he lived in Nagasaki, Japan, and he died before they could meet. Suresh fell in love with the married Amelia when she was giving a tour at the Boston Children’s Science Museum; they had an affair that upended her entire life. Pen pals for years, Father Hashimoto and Suresh sort of met—well, they saw each other—in Nagasaki when Suresh was there for an origami convention; Father Hashimoto watched Suresh fold a bird, and the act brought tears to the priest’s eyes. (The scene is described in such masterful detail in Animals Out of Paper—did Joseph know then that he would eventually return to Suresh and to Japan?)
Joseph’s writing is as vivid and poetic as ever, matched by Jiyoun Chang’s impressionistic lighting design and Shawn Duan’s gorgeous projections (those koi fish!)—even if it sometimes goes over the top. Would an 18-year-old, even an artist, the self-professed “genius at origami” Suresh, pour out lines like “That woman who taught me, my mentor, she mended something in me. But in doing that, she also opened something else up”?
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
In Letters, no one meets face to face; the closest we get is a FaceTime conversation between Suresh and Amelia. And one can’t help but feel a bit cheated—especially after seeing the complex, troubled relationships and exchanges on display in Joseph’s Animals Out of Paper, Guards at the Taj, and Gruesome Playground Injuries. Joseph creates such intriguing, intelligent characters. Melody, for instance, teaches writing at a local college—yet she herself never writes. (She’s not unlike Ilana, the origami expert in Animals, who finds herself unable to fold anything.) So she starts writing to Suresh, because she found his letters to her great-uncle. “I understand, logically, that I am writing letters and tossing them off the back of a ship into the ocean, but the only way I’m able to write anything these days, is simply to write ‘Dear Suresh’ at the top of a piece of paper,” she confesses. “It’s like entering a password, or flashing a fake ID to my subconscious. Suddenly I’m in, and I can express myself with a pen across paper.”
The concept does pay off majorly in the final scene—director May Adrales’ spare staging here is especially lovely—when we finally hear from Father Hashimoto (and Sesma, who is terrific): a wide-ranging letter to Suresh in which the priest recalls the atomic bomb dropping in Nagasaki and his one brush with romantic love. “I know you have doubts about the choices you have made in your life. I don’t know if I have lived my life correctly, either,” he tells his young pen pal. “There is grace to be found down every path.” Perhaps one day Joseph will treat us to more of Father Hashimoto’s story.
Letters of Suresh opened Oct. 12, 2021, at Second Stage and runs through Oct. 24. Tickets and information: 2st.com
