You don’t need to be a big star to appear in “Love Letters,” but it helps.
The two characters in A.R. Gurney’s sedate epistolary romance (written in 1988) are smart, accomplished and wealthy. They exist on a rarified plane. So it helps to cast them with performers who are larger than life. For the national tour of “Love Letters,” at the Bushnell through Valentine’s Day, the producers have reunited Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, co-stars of another grand romance, the 1970 film “Love Story.”
With “Love Letters,” there’s also the issue of sparseness. The script is read aloud, with little more action than the moving of the actors’ mouths.
Gregory Mosher’s 2014 revival of the play, which ran on Broadway with an alternating cast of celebrities prior to this national tour, asks the actors to be costumed — a comfortable gray sweater and black slacks for MacGraw, a dark blazer for O’Neal — and to sit next to each other at a long wooden table. There’s a theatrical flourish in having the play presented on the barest of bare stages. Curtains have been removed so that you see the load-in doors at the back of the stage. The “ghost light” that theaters keep lit overnight as a superstition is in full view. Yet there are no visible microphones, no props, no changes in lighting once the actors emerge and take their seats, and no background music until after the curtain call. It’s an empty room that happens to be a theater.
There’s an unexpected downside to this emptiness. MacGraw and O’Neal are subtly miked so that there is no need for them to raise their voices above a low conversational tone. This creates an annoying echo effect throughout the vast, acoustically refined Bushnell. The echo distorts attempts at nuance and intimacy. Crisper, louder readings would transmit far better.
Yet the intention is admirable. “Love Letters” is a quiet, wistful play of reminiscence. It is told entirely through the correspondence between two well-born, East Coast-raised life-long friends, Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd. The letters are written largely in the present tense, documenting major changes in Andy and Melissa’s lives. They meet as children. They attend different schools. They grow up, finding their personal passions. He studies law; she studies art. They grow apart. They miss each other’s weddings, and awkwardly acknowledge each other’s divorces. They remain close for half a century. Sometimes they’re extremely close, but we hear about those closenesses mainly through the anxiousness which follows. Sometimes, they lose touch or refuse to write, times which are dramatized with long, deliberate pauses. Those moments of silence and confusion can be some of the most riveting elements of Gurney’s fluid, beautifully structured and deeply engrossing drama.
The play exists in a void, one that’s enhanced by the stark visuals of two unencumbered actors reading from plastic binders in the middle of a vast stage.
“Love Letters” is a fine exercise in stripping down a dramatic event to its most basic elements. Gurney keeps cultural markers to a minimum. “Love Letters” obviously takes place from the early-middle to late- 20th century, but it doesn’t get bogged down in the outside world. There’s no mention, for instance, of Hiroshima or Woodstock or JFK’s assassination, or of any world leader for that matter. You get the sense of time changing, but without the usual cliches.
The letters written back and forth between Andy and Melissa give the play a natural pace and momentum. The characters are so well-formed on the page that the actors embody them just by sitting there with the scripts in their hands.
Neither MacGraw nor O’Neal resemble the young romantics they played 45 years ago in “Love Story.” O’Neal hasn’t been called “boyish” for decades, and MacGraw does not access the perky, animated, outspoken qualities she brought to Jenny Cavilleri in “Love Story.” Yet this is canny casting. MacGraw and O’Neal demonstrate the self-confidence that comes with money, comfort and success. They radiate grace and charm. Acting-wise, he sounds more like he’s reading words off a page than she does, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for this play. (He also sips from his onstage water glass twice as fast as she does; in such a leisurely show, you notice such things.)
Since it’s such a literate, reflective encounter, you have to listen in closely to “Love Letters.” Besides, those pesky sound quality issues demand it — not to mention that it’s February, a time of year when people are constantly coughing and wheezing in theaters. Luckily, this intimate read-aloud drama has been revived at a time when we’ve learned how to listen in new ways. Connecticut audiences in particular are familiar with new-play readings at local theaters, which use laid-back formats identical to this production.
“Love Letters” is returning at just the right time, with a most appropriate cast. Happy Valentine’s Day.
“LOVE LETTERS” by A.R. Gurney, directed by Gregory Mosher and starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, is at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford, Feb. 9-14. Performances continue Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $22-$81. Information: 860-987-5900, bushnell.org.
