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Someone once said, “A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”
A.R. Gurney tells us of the friendship between Melissa Gardener and Andrew Makepeace Ladd, III by inviting us to get to know them by looking over their shoulders at the letters that these two souls wrote to each other over the length and breadth of their lives. Theirs is certainly a bittersweet relationship – a warm and complicated entwining of two people similar in their backgrounds, but very different in their points of view. The title of the play, “Love Letters” might lead one to believe that this is a collection of perfect verse, romantic and poetic writings shared between two perfect lovers.
This would be very wrong. In fact, this life-long exchange of thoughts and expressions written on paper and sent back and forth by these two people highlights their weaknesses as well as their strengths. We learn as much from them by what they say to each other, as we do from what is left unsaid. Through it all we learn that Andy and Melissa care about and for each other. They know each other as well as one person can know another and remain, imperfectly in each others’ life in spite of what they know.
“Love Letters” was first brought to the stage at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven on November 3, 1988 with performances by John Rubinstein and Joanna Gleason. Countless productions of this special and touching work have been performed on Broadway and in theaters around the world since then. I saw it performed for the first time a couple of years ago in Ridgefield and am delighted to be presenting it to you along with my friend, Marilyn Olsen.
We wish to express our thanks to the Board of The Brookfield Theater for the Arts and to its’ Artistic Director, Michael Burnett, for giving us the opportunity to bring it here to you. We hope that you enjoy it, obviously, but also that it may help each of us to give thanks for those who have touched our lives, and whose lives we have touched in return.
— Thomas Sheehan, Director
