Letter-writing may be a dying art, but it brought two characters to life in “Love Letters.”
The audience follows Melissa and Andy, played by real life husband and wife actors Tony Shalhoub, from “Monk,” and Brooke Adams, through their relationship from childhood through old age, all captured in the letters they write back and forth to one another.
A simple stage made up of only a table and chair for each character, each of whom remains seated throughout, leaves the expectation of a script with enough substance and sentiment to fill up all the empty space. And it nearly delivers.
Through letters alone, the characters become surprisingly developed and complex. Melissa is wild, artistic, cynical, a bit unrefined and harsh. Andy is calm, rational, careful with his words and a romantic at heart. They make an interesting duo and their letters reflect their personalities ““ Melissa’s letters are short and laced with curse words and insults; Andy’s are long and polite with detailed attention to prose.
It is surprising how, with only letters between the characters and no actual dialogue, the humor, tragedy, love and disappointment are still so easily detected. Two hours of letter-reading is made intriguing through the diversity of correspondence type. Postcards, corny Christmas letters, wedding invitations, birth and job announcements are intertwined with the more traditional letters to help realize a sense of passing time and to break up any potential monotony.
It is clear that a bond is formed between the two. What isn’t clear is how deep that connection runs and whether the assertion of a love between the two, which the plot seems to suggest, is really substantiated.
There is a trust seen through a lot of subtle confessions to one another in reference to deep issues like divorce, alcoholism, molestation, death and affairs. But there is rarely much detail or discussions of feelings lasting more than a few lines. A lot of time is spent on the surface of the separate characters, and I was left feeling like I knew very little about their feelings for one another. The span of time was so long to cover in letters that the characters had to grow up quickly and, though done in subtle and careful ways, it stretched the characters thin, detracting from their depth.
I wanted to feel bad about this love that was always untimely and never realized, but I never felt that they needed or even truly wanted each other. Rather, I felt that they used each other to purge feelings or tell secrets, like to a diary that happened to have a mailing address and a permanent reader.
Still, the ability of such a simple format, with no movement, dialogue or set change, to weave two life stories was fascinating to witness. The added treat of an actual husband and wife reading the parts brought a special authentic chemistry to the characters. If anything, it was a welcome homage to the dying art of prose. The story may not successfully have had me rooting for a fairy-tale ending between the main characters, but it did make me want to turn some e-mails into something tangible, and hopefully handwritten. ““ Lauren Schick
E-mail Schick at lschick@media.ucla.edu.