‘Love Letters’ follows couple’s 50-year relationship through letters

Release Date: 12/16/2002. Expired: 2/28/2003

In the age of faxes, e-mail and cellular phones, Gurney’s Love Letters is a welcome reminder of the intimate and old-fashioned art of letter writing. Love Letters explores a life-long relationship between Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner, carried on primarily through the letters they write to each other. They carry on their loving friendship across 50 years of letters written to each other in Christmas cards, at camp, boarding school, college, travel and career, as well as through several relationships and their own short-lived affair.

Love Letters will be presented in the Gaslight Dinner Theatre at The Renaissance Center at 6:30 p.m. Fridays Jan. 17-Feb. 28. There also will be a special Valentine’s weekend performance Saturday, Feb. 15. Tickets are $25 per person and include dinner and the show.

Ladd, played by Matt Bridges, is the staid, dutiful lawyer and politician. Gardner, played by Krys Collins, is the free-spirited and unstable artist. By reading their letters to each other, the audience follows the poignantly funny friendship and ill-fated romance from second grade through adolescence, maturity and into middle age.

“From their first scrawled childhood valentines to the last guilty goodbyes, Melissa and Andy’s letters envelop the audience in a unique nostalgia, as the characters reveal to each other their inner selves, hidden dreams, goals and lives,” said Pacer Harp, managing director of the Gaslight Dinner Theatre and director of Love Letters. “The pair ponders opportunity lost and love squandered, revealing the very essence of their lifelong relationship. And it is all done only through their letters and cards to each other.”

Gurney is the author of such critically acclaimed plays as The Dining Room and The Cocktail Hour and also wrote Sylvia, which enjoyed a successful run last fall in the Gaslight Dinner Theatre. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama and a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Gurney says Love Letters came into being by accident.

“Actually, I wasn’t trying to write a play at all,” Gurney says. “I always used to write all my plays on a typewriter. Finally, a few years ago, I broke down and bought a computer. But I didn’t know how to use the word processing software. So I sat down at the computer and decided to teach myself how.”

Instead of typing mindless keyboard exercises, Gurney familiarized himself with the computer by writing letters back and forth between two fictional characters. Gradually, they took on a life of their own.

“When the characters started speaking to me, I realized I would need to stay with it and see the story through,” he says, explaining that he envisioned the finished product as a short story. “So when I finished it, I sent it off to The New Yorker for possible publication. But they rejected it. They wrote me a letter saying they were sorry but they didn’t publish plays. I thought to myself, ‘This isn’t a play, but maybe it will work as one.’”

Gurney first tested audience reaction to the unfinished Love Letters when he and actress Holland Taylor read the play instead of a speech Gurney was scheduled to give at the New York Public Library. After finishing the conversion of his writing exercise turned short story turned play, Love Letters made a six-week preparation run at the Long Wharf Theatre, then opened in New York Feb. 13, 1989, with John Rubinstein and Kathleen Turner on the stage.

In Time magazine, William A. Henry III called Love Letters “one of the four or five best American plays of the ’80s.”

“This is the story of pen pals for life,” Harp says. “In their cards and letters over 50 years, they move from friends to lovers, but eventually their lives pull them in different directions. They update each other on their lives through the letters, but also share their most intimate thoughts. They share their highest joys and their lowest depressions, their darkest fears and their biggest dreams. This play will easily take you from laughing to crying and back and forth.”

For more information on the Gaslight Dinner Theatre, call (615)740-5600. To make reservations for a production of Love Letters, call the box office at (615)740-5570 or visit The Renaissance Center at 855 Highway 46 South in Dickson, just 35 miles west of Nashville on Interstate 40 at exit 172.

The Menu:

Release Date: 12/16/2002. Expired: 2/28/2003

Pork Tenderloin
Chicken Breast

Italian Green Beans
New Potatoes with Lemon And Chives
Tiny Carrots with Dill Butter
Cauliflower and Broccoli with Peppers and Parmesan

Tossed Salad
Dinner Rolls

Red Velvet Cake
Fresh Fruit
Heavenly Hash

Coffee And Tea

Visit the Gaslight Dinner Theatre page for more about dinner theatre.

News

Date Released	Expiration	Headline
No Press Releases to show...