Inspired by correspondence of fact and fiction that’s stood the test of time, The Letters Series explores the thrill of witnessing great relationships unfold and sometimes shape our history in an age of instant communication. Dear Liar and Love Letters allow us to look “behind the curtain” and examine the universal.
The Drama of Letters, Swirling With Suspense
Posted initially via The New York Times
Irish Repertory Theater’s Letters Series is a reminder: For sketching the arc of a relationship, nothing compares to intimate correspondence, our critic writes.
“Barbarous wretch: do you think I can live by imagination alone?” George Bernard Shaw groused in a 1913 letter to the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Their yearslong correspondence is the subject of Jerome Kilty’s play “Dear Liar.” Credit…Universal Images Group, via Getty Images; Historical Picture Archive, via Getty Images
April 27, 2023
The playwright A.R. Gurney knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote “Love Letters,” a classic of the epistolary genre whose durability is due in no small part to its status as a magnet for celebrity casts.
As noted in the script, his 1988 play “needs no theater, no lengthy rehearsal, no special set, no memorization of lines, and no commitment from its two actors beyond the night of performance.” It simply requires actors to be side by side, reading letters aloud.
But choosing correspondence as a medium was awfully clever, too. It’s an inherently dramatic device — because a letter is both a vessel for self-expression and a catalyst for a response. Suspense swirls around what that response might be, and often whether one will arrive at all.
I confess to having a voracious appetite for other people’s mail, whether it’s read aloud onstage or inscribed in the pages of a book. For sketching the arc of a relationship, nothing compares to years’ worth of intimate correspondence.
Irish Repertory Theater’s Letters Series appeals to that predilection. Starting with Melissa Errico and David Staller in Jerome Kilty’s play “Dear Liar” (through Sunday), which is adapted from the decades-long exchange between George Bernard Shaw and the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the series concludes with Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti in “Love Letters” (May 30-June 3), whose Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner — friends since second grade — are fictional characters in the customary Gurney mold: white, Protestant, preppy.
“I’m writing because when I telephoned, you just hung up on me,” Andy scrawls to a miffed Melissa at some point in their college years. “One thing about letters: you can’t hang up on them.”
“You can tear up letters, though,” she snaps in reply. “Enclosed are the pieces.”
Gurney gives Melissa a sneaky kind of depth. An artistic child who comes of age in the 1950s, she morphs into an unhappy woman — a rebel manqué descended into substance abuse.
It’s jaw-dropping now to look at the roster of actresses who portrayed her in the original Broadway run of “Love Letters,” in 1989: among them Colleen Dewhurst, Swoosie Kurtz, Lynn Redgrave and Elaine Stritch. At the performance reviewed for The New York Times, Stockard Channing played Melissa.
In an era when substantial roles for women were significantly scarcer than they are now, Melissa got something like equal time with Andy over their half century of conversation — an advantage of the back-and-forth format that epistolary plays invite. Little wonder that boldface-name actresses were lining up.
The year before that, Charlotte Moore, Irish Rep’s artistic director, was among the actresses who played the role in the world-premiere production, at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven.
“Dear Liar,” which starred Brian Aherne and Katharine Cornell when it was first seen on Broadway in 1960, is the principal reason that people other than theater historians still know Campbell’s name, now forever linked with Shaw’s.
“Barbarous wretch: do you think I can live by imagination alone?” Shaw groused in a 1913 letter to Campbell, when she kept him waiting too long for a note. “Have you nothing to say to me?”
And Campbell, who would later be the first Eliza Doolittle in his “Pygmalion,” hit back at his prickly pedagogical tendencies reminiscent of Henry Higgins: “I have always been an odious letter writer — you have made me worse — grumbling that I can neither punctuate nor spell … you literary tradesman you!”
Theirs is a lively ink-on-paper conversation, but I am less enamored of it than of Shaw’s more thoughtful, and ultimately more heart-bruising, exchange with the actress Ellen Terry. Beginning in 1892, when he was a critic and fledgling playwright, it lasted for 30 years.
“Your letter makes me shriek with laughter,” Shaw wrote to her in 1899, “though I am in the worst of tempers.”
“I’m glad my scrawl made you ‘laugh,’” she replied promptly. “Your letter made my head spin …”
After her death in 1928, when a book of their correspondence came out, Shaw warned readers “not to judge it according to the code of manners which regulate polite letter writing in cathedral country towns.”
Given his penchant for flirting up a storm on the page — first with Terry, later with Campbell — he had a vested interest in contextualizing his own behavior, particularly because he was a married man. Temptingly, he explained that “the theater, behind the scenes, has an emotional freemasonry of its own, certainly franker and arguably wholesomer than the stiffness of suburban society outside.”
Which is precisely the allure of published correspondence: the promised glimpse of private selves having private chats — formidable cultural figures at their most down to earth. If Shaw had been all decorum, his letters and his plays would have been a snooze.
The foremost epistolary playwright of the current American theater has to be Sarah Ruhl, whose sublime romantic tragicomedy “Eurydice” (2003) is set in motion by a letter to the title character from her dead father in the underworld.
Eurydice joins him there, and then she too writes from the underworld, telling her husband, Orpheus: “I’ll give this letter to a worm. I hope he finds you.”
“All letter-writing is dangerous, anyway — fraught with peril,” the poet Elizabeth Bishop told Robert Lowell in 1962.Credit…Getty Images “There’s no one else I can quite talk to with confidence and abandon and delicacy,” Lowell wrote to Bishop in 1959.Credit…Associated Press
Any worthwhile correspondence is fueled by the desire, even the need, to reach across a yawning separation. That’s certainly true of “Words in Air,” the ferociously beautiful collected letters of the far-flung poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, which Ruhl refashioned into her tantalizing 2012 play, “Dear Elizabeth.”
“I feel so forlorn without you, though this has been a happy year,” Lowell wrote to Bishop in 1959. “There’s no one else I can quite talk to with confidence and abandon and delicacy.”
But as Bishop knew, it can be anxious-making to speak the truth on paper and mail it off, not knowing how the recipient will take it. “All letter-writing is dangerous, anyway — fraught with peril,” she told Lowell in 1962.
Not the least of those perils is grief. This year brought the premiere of Ruhl’s intensely personal “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” a stage adaptation of “Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship,” the collection of her correspondence with Max Ritvo. A poet and former student of hers, he died in 2016, just four years after they met.
Mortality hangs over epistolary dramas in a way that other plays can more easily escape. A correspondence that spans years might have its intermittent sputters, but it finally ends for a reason, and often — as with nearly all of the pairs mentioned here — that reason is someone’s death or debility. The letters can then become a source of consolation: relics of a precious connection.
Letters, of course, can also be a kind of performance, especially when the authors have reason to believe that their words might be public someday. But a correspondence is an accumulation, and truth has a way of creeping in: what the writers mean to reveal about themselves, and what they don’t realize they’re letting slip.
We, their audience, see where they disappoint one another, where their friendships falter, where other people in their lives feel threatened by the bond they’ve forged. We see, too, where they love one another more desperately than they intended.
It’s all very dramatic. And so we lean in.
I Love Performing Those Songs. But What About the Gender Politics?
The problem we found as we considered this more feminist reading was that it was hard to play Daisy as canny when she’s directly described as “a mound of melted marshmallow.” In the first farcical scene, she is hypnotized over and over by accident — and even hypnotizes herself a few times. She also hears phones before they ring and makes flowers instantly grow by talking to them.
It’s also crucial to Act II that Daisy knows almost nothing about Melinda.
I remained confident that there was a real woman in Daisy, if we could find her. Lerner’s musical women, however dated they might seem on the surface, usually offer little parables about living in all our dimensionality.
Looking to Guinevere
On the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, for instance, I once played Guinevere in Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot,” opposite Jeremy Irons. The problem with Guinevere is that the audience is always ready to turn on her because she is sleeping with Arthur’s knight, Lancelot. She’s an adulteress, and the audience doesn’t like it.
But on inspection, her circumstances aren’t really unsympathetic, and are beautifully delineated in T.H. White’s original book, “The Once and Future King.” Though she is a queen, we learn, she has been compelled to marry a much older, if kindly, man. She’s ultimately torn between courtly idealism with Arthur and another form of idealism, her romantic-erotic relationship with Lancelot. If her early songs are sung in a spirit of innocent high-mindedness, instead of coquetterie, her second act makes sense.
The challenge in putting her onstage today is to make palpable both the purity of Guinevere’s intention and the impossibility of her double love. She’s a woman who made a brave and audacious choice — to love twice, with equal passion — that her time can’t yet support.
A Complicated Eliza
Eliza, the preceding role in the Lerner and Loewe canon, is perhaps more hotly debated than any other right now, thanks to Lincoln Center Theater’s Broadway revival, which opened in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
To play Eliza in our own 1994 production on Broadway, the late director Howard Davies cast me with the understanding that I would be young, but hardly delicate. He wanted to begin the show with Eliza looking very much like a man, dressed from head to toe like Charlie Chaplin. But as she is made to be more ladylike, with a plummy accent and gowns to match, her gender would become a different trap in place of poverty — her makeover leaving her equipped only for the marriage market.
As the show toured on the way to Broadway, however, changes were made to soften the unfamiliarity of this interpretation. And with that went some of the political edge. I returned from a break during the long tour and found the Chaplin costumes were not black anymore. That filthy gray-white shirt was now pink, and my long black coat was now violet, with a purple cap.
The current production, with Lauren Ambrose as Eliza, has her definitively walking out on Henry Higgins in the last scene.
Ours was played in the same spirit, but as a dream sequence. Eliza emerged from behind a giant phrenological head that stood alone on a completely blackened stage. Higgins still said “Where the devil are my slippers?” but Eliza, as I played her, stood there poker-faced. Higgins, reflecting, knew that had lost her, or almost, and by quoting himself, admitted he knew why.
Daisy was tougher to figure out.
As we continued digging into the part over the final weeks, new and more subtle clues to the kind of modern woman she might become emerged. In her first song, “Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here,” Daisy, singing to a flower pot, may seem a little daffy, but the song ends with her singing the lines “Wake up / Bestir yourself / It’s time that you disinter yourself!”
Bestir yourself! There was the woman I was excited to portray.
Not The Victim She Seems
In the second act, Daisy sings “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?,” one of the best torch songs Lane ever wrote. At first glance, it is a victim’s anthem. Daisy even refers to herself that way in the song’s bridge: “I’m just a victim of time / Obsolete in my prime / Out of date and outclassed / By my past.”
It seems to be a song about not being loved for who you are. “What did he like that I lost track of?” the lyrics continue. “What did I do that I don’t do the way I did before?”
And yet Daisy so obviously knows herself right there: baring her emotions directly — guttural, unaffected, heartfelt and earthy. Worried and intimidated, yes, but showing through song that she’s also a woman of jazzy authority and sexual courage.
In the final scene of “On a Clear Day,” the doctor telepathically calls Daisy to him, and she comes back — to tell him the game is fully over. In the script, he’s supposed to convince her that actually he’s missed her, Daisy, more than he misses her alter ego, Melinda, so he unites the two identities.
But, as we moved into previews, I felt that I had cured the passivity in Daisy and allowed her to bring the two women together herself. I didn’t let the doctor unite the women; I even had to get rid of him, for a minute, to let Daisy possess herself as she banishes him from her Manhattan garden.
In a later moment in Act II, I let Daisy sit down, taking a suitcase and making it a throne; indicating just by her posture that she now knows who she is. It’s her first clear day, and she sees — knows — she has to step into her own body, and her present life, before she can step into love.
And literally through her, the doctor also finds the key to his own transformation. Daisy, like Eliza, is the energy that thaws the frozen man. The agent of his change.
I checked in again with my millennial colleague.
“Watching the process has meant that my objections are now … tempered,” she said, temperately. “You and Charlotte have made her less a victim and more a late bloomer. Because you are not … 23 or, say, 24 … one problematic aspect is tempered.”
As a terminal ingénue in her 40s, I felt conflicted being told that I had saved Daisy with my own, well, maturity. But I was glad to hear confirmation that she was becoming not merely a dated role, but a real woman.
Daisy, like all true heroines, comes to own her complexity. As she told her flowers when they were hiding from the sun, the trick is to be seen.
Interview: Ryan Silverman & Melissa Errico
Ryan Silverman & Melissa Errico Talk Finian’s Rainbow Giggle Fits, Cherished Passion Memories, & Much More
Originally posted via Broadway Box
December 19th, 2016
Tony nominee Melissa Errico is back at Irish Rep reprising her acclaimed performance as Sharon McLonergan in the beloved musical Finian’s Rainbow. Sharing that old devil moon is her former Passion co-star and dashing leading man, Ryan Silverman (Side Show, Chicago, Phantom of the Opera). The pair have gone from the passionate Clara and Giorgio to the swooning Sharon and Woody.
BroadwayBox caught up with the dynamic duo to talk about reuniting for Finian’s, cherished Passion memories, and playing with all the crayons in the box.My first impression of my co-star: Ryan:
Free and open. I tend to be a little stand off-ish when I first meet someone or step into a new group, but the first time I met her she was an open book. Very kind and generous. She’s a total nerd and loves studying everything but also love to play around. So it made me very comfortable.
Melissa:
Tall and very clean looking.
My favorite moment we share onstage together in Finian’s Rainbow: Ryan:
The moment I play guitar for her in Act 2. It’s our first real, quiet moment together with no one else on stage. Where it’s not about “doing” anything. It’s a beautiful genuine moment we get to have with one another. Then I get to serenade her with my guitar.
Melissa:
I like telling him the “old valley legend”… and telling him I’m from Glocca Morra. It’s like admitting I’m from fairyland but offering him a real human connection. It’s such a strange and wonderful first encounter between romantic characters. I love the symbolism and unrealistic sides of Finian’s, and how they co-exist with real natural feeling. My second favorite is the end when I tell Woody that Glocca Morra isn’t on a map. He learns it is Hope itself.
Moment I knew we had a special connection:Ryan:
The first time she lied on top of me for our first day of rehearsal in Passion. Haha. But truly, that’s not an easy thing to do with someone you don’t know well, but we jumped right in, had a good laugh over the ridiculousness of what we do, and felt safe enough with each other to embrace the scene. We built a strong bond of trust in that show.
Melissa:
We had done symphony work together before we did Passion, and he was so much fun in concert. He makes me laugh and he’s very light-hearted. But I guess it was during Passion that we developed a lot of trust. John Doyle demands such honesty and intimacy from everyone. Ryan and I trusted John, and as a result a bond between us was formed. A bond that we could share our deepest emotions in that story.
A random backstage ritual we share:Ryan:
Checking each other’s teeth before going onstage and Melissa reminds me to wipe the lipstick off my lips from the previous scene.
Melissa:
Sometimes I remind him to wipe the lipstick off his face after we kiss, and he likes to tell me when I have food or lipstick on my teeth. I guess we can call this collegial co-grooming!
A small moment we have in the show that I love but audiences might miss:Ryan:
We have a moment where we spin each other around over and over…and over. We usually have a genuine laugh/ terror on our face because it’s a fine line from simply spinning around each other and slipping and taking down everyone on stage like two bowling balls.
Melissa:
When he plays the guitar in Act 2, Sharon thinks he’s so cool when he does these three little finger plucks, like a mini guitar solo. I usually laugh but really not very obviously. She thinks Woody is so smooth and dazzling! (That’s when Ryan hits the right strings! If he misses, Sharon loves him for trying.) Ryan is perfect for Woody because he isn’t a worrier—he carries on and things work out. We both enjoy when things go off plan. (Problem is when we get giggles, but let’s not discuss this.)
I think our performances work so well together because:Ryan:
We’ve built a lot of trust between the two of us where we can be free to try something and know the other will go along with it. Whether or not it’s right. That’s a great safety net to have. Great things come from that. She’s giddy and zany one minute and then all serious and focused the next, then deeply moved or tearful. She has lots of colors in her crayon box. It keeps me on my toes for sure, and keeps me flexible and makes me take risks with her. We both are married and have children so we have a strong understanding of what’s important and how to balance career and family.
Melissa:
I love singing with him. I trust him. Is that a long enough answer? We are relaxed.
My most cherished Passion memory of my co-star:Ryan:
All of it. It was my favorite process. It was incredibly challenging for me because I had to go to some pretty dark places and Melissa made it very easy for me to find that in myself. Whether it was the opening scene of being two lovers alone together knowing we were going to be apart from each other, or the heartbreaking scene of that being torn apart and me leaving her there alone on the stage. We were fully immersed in those characters.
Melissa:
Is everything. Maybe my favorite moment was when the curtain opened (a transition late in the show) and I was ready to tell him my husband is away and we can take a drive into the country. It was a face to face scene, not a letter. I remember the intensity of how willing Clara felt and how Giorgio was pulling away. It was crushing to do.
Another musical I’d love to do together:Ryan:
Sunday in the Park with George. Camelot. But more than that, I’d love something new to create together.
Melissa:
ALL OF THEM.
I’m in awe of my co-star’s ability to:Ryan:
Be a mother of three beautiful girls and still be able to come to work fully invested, full of passion and want to do all it takes to make her performance and the show as good as it can be.
Melissa:
Make every day at work fun.
If I had to describe my co-star as a fictional character:Ryan:
“Mork (from the TV show Mork and Mindy) but better looking.”
Melissa:
There is no mold for Ryan, but if I had to attempt an answer, I’ll say he’s a character actor trapped in Clark Kent’s body capable of being Superman when paid enough.