Article:9815; Posted: June 10, 2015 at 1:00 p.m.

Barn Theatre Producer and Director Brendan Ragotzy’s curtain speech opening night of “Love Letters” was punctuated by cell phone sounds from various seats in the house, followed by grumbles, murmurs, and laughter from the audience.

Though irritating, the disruption effectively set the stage. In “Love Letters,” A.R. Gurney’s play written in epistolary form, two actors sit side by side behind desks reading aloud the letters their characters have written each other over the course of their lives. It’s intimate and romantic, surprisingly irreverent and funny, and never sentimental.

“Letter writing is a dying art,” Andrew Makepeace Ladd III quotes his father as saying in an early mid-20th century letter to Melissa Gardner, his childhood friend and confidante.

A 2015 audience feels the truth of those words more deeply amid a cacophony of electronic sound in a darkened Michigan barn off the beaten path. Otherwise immersed in text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, does anyone write letters via email, much less put pen to paper for the purpose of correspondence?

The form is all but dead at this point, which makes what amounts to a staged reading of love letters generated between a man and a woman that show their evolution all the more meaningful.

Robert Newman and Penelope Alex have wonderful chemistry together and fully embody upper crust East Coast WASPs, an especially impressive feat given the simplicity and limitations of the show’s staging. There’s no blocking, no eye contact, and yet their personalities and connection emerge through their words, their vocal inflections, and their facial expressions.

Newman’s deep and commanding voice is especially effective in creating Ladd’s conservative moral fiber and stability, a terrific counterpoint to Alex’s range in effecting Gardner’s impetuous, cynical nature exacerbated by her parents’ divorce, a terrible stepfather, and her mother’s alcoholism that lays the foundation for a troubled roller coaster life full of tragedy and uncertainty. Both actors do a wonderful job traversing age, from second grade to late middle age, with their voices alone.

“Help! Get me out of here!” is a common opening in Gardner’s letters, a constant cry from various boarding schools, homes, and facilities she inhabits. His response, often, is that she must return to her art. While writing is his forte, drawing and painting is hers.

She grows impatient with his long-winded writing and begs him to call her by telephone instead, but he insists letters are superior because of their permanence, their materiality, and how much of himself he puts into them.

“I feel like I’m truly me when I’m writing you. . . . It is a present of myself to you . . . the way I want to be with you,” Ladd says, though she makes her point that “phones win” when she accepts a date from another man who interrupts her letter reading with a phone call.

Ultimately, they realize there is a performance in what feels like the stripped-down soul-baring of their letters to which their in-real-life meetings cannot compare.

And so they carry on separately for decades, though always staying connected via the page, knowing on some level they are the loves of each other’s lives.

The theme, language, and form are old fashioned, yes, although still vibrant. Much like live theatre. After all, it’s one of the few spaces left where we are asked to untether ourselves from the smart phones we rarely even use for phone calls.

And yet there is relief in all of it, and we emerge, particularly with this play, somehow feeling more connected to what matters.

SHOW DETAILS:
Love Letters
Barn Theatre
13351 West M-96, Augusta
June 9-14, 2015
Tuesday through Friday at 8:00 p.m.
Saturday at 5:00 p.m. and 8:30 p.m,
Sunday at 5:00 p.m.
$37.00 with group discounts available
269.731.4121
www.barntheatreschool.org