A. R. Gurney (1930-2017) was our chronicler of 20th century white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, people of privilege. Known familiarly in the theater community as Pete in accordance with his consistently affable manner, he looked closely at those well-heeled North-eastern denizens in plays like The Dining Room, The Perfect Party, The Cocktail Hour, and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Love Letters.
It was his intention to make the point – he made it successively — incapsulated in the old cliché about money not necessarily guaranteeing happiness. Too frequently, it can bring its own piercing, if often unspoken, anxieties.
When he wrote Love Letters, in which he reiterated that melancholy observation, he did himself – as well as countless actors – a big favor. A two-character play involving the financially comfortable Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and the equally financially comfortable Melissa Gardner, it consists solely of letters exchanged between the two from their meeting in second grade through – well, from 1937 to 1985.
During the 105 minutes, including intermission, that Andrew and Melissa send and receive the epistles – almost as if characters in early epistolary novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela – the actors are only required to sit at two desks or perhaps a table and read aloud the so-called love letters. They aren’t even asked to look at each other. In most productions of this gift to actors (and to Gurney in terms of royalties rolling in), they are usually directed not to look at each other until the curtain call.
You can imagine how enticing a set-up this is for actors who’d appreciate the opportunity to appear in theaters, especially actors busily involved in movies or television but craving the chance to spend at least limited time on Broadway. An example of such actors taking the bait occurred, for instance, between September and February 2014-15 when Brian Dennehy, Mia Farrow, Alan Alda, Candace Bergen, Carol Burnett, Stacy Keach, Diana Rigg, Angelica Huston, and Martin Sheen spent two weeks or possibly a third in a commercially successful B’way run.
Now Ciarán O’Reilly is directing Gurney’s beloved work in an Irish Repertory Theatre revival with two actors more allied to the New York City stage, Matthew Broderick as Andy Ladd and Laura Benanti as Melissa. It’s billed as a staged reading in IRT’s current “Letters Series.” (Only a few weeks ago, David Staller and Melissa Errico appeared in a first-rate, eight-performance presentation of Dear Liar, letters exchanged between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.)
Once again Ladd and Gardner send missives to one another that imply a life-long love affair never entirely acknowledged, though eventually consummated. For his part and after Andy and Melissa share childhood and adolescent experiences like the dancing classes monied kids assiduously attended, he’s off to prep school and Yale (joining the distinguished Fence, Saint Anthony Hall, Scroll and Key). He goes on to law school, rises to the United States Senate, sees the world, marries and marries again, raises children.
Melissa, the daughter of a broken marriage and a mother who drinks to excess, matriculates at the prestigious Emma Willard, marries more than once while pursuing a career as an artist. She repeatedly interrupts herself, unsatisfied with her work, with her own failed marriages and her performance as a mother. She deals with – or doesn’t deal with – her extensive displeasures by drinking so excessively that she’s in and out of rehabilitation.
Ceasing to write for periods of time or only sending Christmas greetings for some years, Andy and Melissa – he the happy letter-writer, she habitually insisting she dislikes writing letters – carry on with something audience members know that the two scribblers don’t quite: that they are in deeper love than they often claimed to be elsewhere.
In other words, where unrequited love rears its sorry head, they are much worse off than legendary letter-writing, renowned lovers Abélard and Héloïse (now entombed side by side in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery). Andy and Melissa are never united other than by their letter-writing. All the while their separation becomes an irresistibly bittersweet play, or, uh, staged reading.
When at the start of each act Broderick and Benanti enter – he pulling out her chair, as a Northern-elite gentleman has been trained to do – they sit at a wooden table where their letters are placed in black binders. From then on, the actors fulfill their assignments exceedingly well. Broderick, who always seems to know something puckish he isn’t going to impart, may, for that reason, lack the intrinsic ability to affect Andy’s slowly acquired stuffiness. Otherwise, he’s a fine WASP of an Andrew Ladd. Benanti is an equally fine, chisel-featured Melissa, though never behaving even slightly as if having written or reading under the influence of alcohol. (This is undoubtedly, of course, how director O’Reilly wants it.)
Since no set designer is credited, it may be O’Reilly who chose the table at which the actors are seated, Broderick in a straight-backed chair, Benanti in an upholstered wooden chair – and both vitalizing Pete Gurney’s history of letters about a profound love somehow lost in the mail.
Love Letters opened May 30, 2023, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through June 9. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
