Theatre in Review: Love Letters (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)

	Mia Farrow, Brian Dennehy. Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

Considered from a distance, A. R. Gurney's Love Letters probably looks like the last word in stunt theatre: A two-character play told entirely in letters, designed to be read rather than acted out, and featuring a rotating cast of stars in limited runs. A treat for stargazers, yes, with a budget designed to set a producer's heart aflutter--but, really, a serious work of theatre?

Yes, really. Love Letters is a richly amusing and sharply observed tale charting the missed connections and bad timing that misdirect the course of true love between a pair whose lives are shaped--for better and for worse--by the strict WASP code according to which they were raised. The entire rota of social rituals as practiced at mid-century--the thank-you notes, dance classes, boarding schools, and football weekends--is treated with humor that is sometimes gently nostalgic but more often quietly barbed. As the years pass and the darkness closes in, Love Letters packs a considerable wallop, one that you probably won't have seen coming when you were chuckling over cotillions and corsages.

Love Letters presents the lifelong correspondence of Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner. He comes from modest, but impeccable, stock, and strives for good manners, good deportment, and a good reputation. She hails from real money and a broken home made worse by a mother who can't stop remarrying, all of which has made her a natural rebel: Show her a rule, and she will break it. As currently portrayed by Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow--he finding remarkable emotional shadings inside Andrew's buttoned-down persona and she infusing each line with irresistible mischief and, later, anguish--they make a most engaging pair.

Their early notes, beginning in 1935, are not promising: "When it's warmer out, can I come and swim in your pool?" he asks. "No, you can't," she replies. "I have a new nurse named Miss Hawthorne who thinks you'll give me infantile paralysis." Nevertheless, he perseveres, and they begin their lifelong habit of almost falling in love. Farrow's Melissa is eminently lovable. She delights when, with a nonchalant toss of her hair, she purrs, "Guess what? I'm going to a psychiatrist now," adding with tremendous self-satisfaction, "I talk about sex all the time. It's terribly expensive but it's worth it." Shipped off to "Emma Willard's Academy for Young Lesbians," she complains sharply, "They've made me room with this fat, spoiled Cuban bitch who has nine pairs of shoes, and all she does is lie on her bed and listen to Finian's Rainbow." Later, stung by Andrew's lack of romantic attentions, she introduces a new beau: "His name is Darwin and he works on Wall Street, where he believes in the survival of the fittest," adding with faintly eerie detachment, "When he laughs, he sounds like Pinocchio turning into a donkey." Yet, when Andrew asks her about a visit to the father she hasn't seen in years, the silence that follows is heartbreakingly eloquent.

As the years pass, Melissa constantly complains that Andrew hides his feelings behind a wall of graceful prose. (She'd prefer the telephone.) He even has the nerve to quote Paradise Lost to her. But in Andrew's defense of written correspondence, Dennehy captures Andrew's innate gentleness, and the way he clings to the old order of things as a life raft in an uncertain and changing world. "I pick up a pen," he says, "and almost immediately everything seems to take shape around me."

Time isn't kind to Melissa and Andrew. They pointedly miss each other's weddings. Stationed in Japan with the Navy, he has an abortive affair with a local girl, which he refuses to discuss, no matter how much Melissa prods him. As he climbs the ladder of worldly success, moving from Yale to a DC-based law firm to a political career, picking up a suitable wife and the right number of children along the way, she slides down a path marked by a broken marriage, failure as a parent and an artist, and a growing addiction to "Kickapoo joy juice." When they finally do become lovers, Andrew describes the encounter as "two old WASPs going at it like a sale at Brooks Brothers." But when love finally comes, it comes too late: Melissa can't get off her downward slope and Andrew can't extricate himself from the web of responsibilities in which he has become enmeshed.

The spare simplicity of Love Letters allows one to savor Gurney's mastery of his craft, the way his careful placement of details reveals volumes about Melissa and Andrew's ever-changing circumstances. A too-careful comment about his wife and a throwaway mention of a son's struggle with drugs--as well as a series of increasingly rote Christmas greetings--lay bare the emptiness at the heart of Andrew's life. Melissa's terse way with words ("I was married. I'm not now.") is rife with unexpressed emotion. As the losses pile up, the author effortlessly guides his characters from the realm of light comedy into a place of terrible sadness.

Even if you've seen Love Letters before, another visit may prove revelatory. I saw it 25 years ago with Cliff Robertson and Elaine Stritch, who played it as a dry comedy of manners, with a distinct undertone of melancholy. Dennehy's Andrew uses his conventional exterior to mask a divided heart, the sadness in his eyes belying his studied composure. Farrow is devastating as she grows from a lively, talented, and bluntly honest young lady into a "boozed out, lascivious, cynical old broad." When, at last, she realizes that Andrew cannot--or will not--save her, the terror in her voice is almost painful to hear. The director, Gregory Mosher, has gotten the best out of these two very fine actors; it makes one curious to see what he will do with the stars scheduled to appear in the coming weeks, among them Carol Burnett, Alan Alda, and Candice Bergen.

Love Letters features a blue-chip design team--scenery by John Lee Beatty, costumes by Jane Greenwood, lighting by Peter Kaczorowski, and sound by Scott Lehrer--all of whom have collaborated to create the illusion of a first-reading by actors in rehearsal clothes. It's not the kind of work that wins anyone awards, but all deliver like the pros they are.

For all his commercial success--he is one of the most-produced American playwrights--Gurney has always been denied a certain critical respect, partly, I think, because his influences--acute social observers like John Cheever, John O'Hara, and John P. Marquand--are less valued than they once were. Nevertheless, he has proven to be an invaluable chronicler of the decline of America's ruling class, creating a gallery of characters who love the traditions they were born to, even as they struggle to break free. And, always, his writing is marked by an innate grace. At one point, Andrew notes that letter writing is "a dying art." Not in A. R. Gurney's hands, it isn't.--David Barbour