Love Letters Offers Much Pleasure
A pair of desks on opposite sides of the Gladstone Theatre stage. Behind each, a chair — one occupied by a woman named Melissa Gardner, the other by a man named Andrew Makepeace Ladd lll.
A.R. Gurney’s 1989 play, Love Letters, has a deceptively simple setting, but one rich with possibility. In an age of e-mail exchanges and text messaging, this Pulitzer Prize finalist evokes the past, conjuring up a whole emotional world by means of the written exchanges between these two people over the course of 50 years. Because those lifetimes also involve the choices they make within a wider social and political context, and because those choices are sometimes questionable, the play also assumes a rueful “what if” quality as it approaches its climax.
That quality keeps emerging in Teri Loretto-Valentik’s production at the Gladstone Theatre — although it seemed somewhat tentative on opening night. Pierre Brault and Lucy van Oldenbarneveld, both pleasing performers, are responsive to the material and also — one would assume — to the challenge of creating fully developed characters out of what is essentially a platform reading, but are they completely there yet?
Gurney is something of a contemporary Philip Barry in his explorations of America’s upper-class culture: its strengths, its fault lines and — most importantly to him — its variants. So with Love Letters, even those early childhood moments — defined by the birthday party invitations, the summer camp postcards, and the complaining letters from private school — begin etching two distinctive individuals for us.
In the case of Melissa Gardner, the wealthier and more privileged of the two, Lucy van Oldenbarneveld presents us early on with a rebellious kid — bright, tart-tongued and restless, a child of divorce who is not adjusting to those circumstances at all well, and a demanding young friend when it comes to her exchanges with Andrew. In van Oldenbarneveld’s performance — and she uses silences well in this production — we’re already getting glimpses of the troubled, unfulfilled adult she will become. In the case of Pierre Brault, important seeds are being planted as well: in giving us this cautious, essentially conservative youngster named Andrew Makepeace Ladd, Brault is providing a blueprint for a successful adult life that — notwithstanding his risk-averse sensibility — will take him to the U.S. Senate.
One fascinating aspect of Love Letters is the way that these seemingly disparate human beings maintain a sturdy although at times beleaguered friendship over the decades — while remaining resistant until too late to the possibility that it could offer something more. It’s a wise and humane play that eschews easy sentimentality but does acknowledge the reality of loss and unrealized opportunities.
But it was not always evident opening night that these two players, so effective at times, particularly in the comic exchanges, were managing to sustain the play’s emotional connections in its more serious moments. To be sure, these connections can be elusive — that’s part of what the play is about — but they must still be there. When, in performance, a letter comes across as no more than a dutiful reading, a dramatic arc is in danger of being severed. There are also moments when the evening seems engaged in a struggle to find the right rhythm, thereby hinting that it is still a production in progress.
Even so, the bottom line remains. This Love Letters will offer a good deal of legitimate pleasure to a a great many theatregoers.
Love Letters by A.R. Gurney
A Plosive Production
Gladstone Theatre to Feb. 6
Director: Teri Loretto-Valentik
Sound: Lori Jean Hodge
Lighting: David Magladry
Andrew Makepeace Ladd lll: Pierre Brault
Melissa Gardner: Lucy van Oldenbarneveld