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"Love
Letters"
Witten
by A.R. Gurney; directed by Gregory Mosher.
Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 West 47th Street, New York City.
Opened Sept 18, 2014; closes Feb 1, 2015.
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar Sept 24, 2014.
"Love Letters" has luminous Mia Farrow as neurotic female
confronting perfect male
"Love Letters" is a charmer, but also rather
sexist. A.R. Gurney’s play, which premiered in 1988, emphasizes
the woman character as flaky, neurotic, self-absorbed and the man
as solid, intelligent, all patience and understanding. All but perfect.
You wonder why the female character is swaddled in flaws while the
man has nary a one. Mia Farrow plays Melissa Gardner, daughter of
a very rich but somewhat dysfunctional family. Not much parental love
from a distant divorced father and alcoholic mother.
Brian Dennehy is Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, the "III" tells
you something, of a family that’s also WASP and rich, though
less so than the Gardners. We note the distinction that Melissa’s
grandmother has a butler.
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| Mia
Farrow as Melissa and Brian Dennehy as Andy. Photo by Carol Rosegg. |
The children are in school together from second grade
in 1937, separated at boys and girls boarding schools and college.
From childhood to age 55, they write letters to each other, and snippets
from those letters are the dialogue of the play.
They sit next to each other at a long wood table, but don’t
look at each other until she pierces him with her gaze at the end.
Farrow is luminous in an unforgettable performance. In rimless glasses
and long curly blonde hair, she is very girlish, a real kid. Later
she moves and twists her body in a pitch-perfect portrayal of a teen.
A bit older, she carries on at a pool party, a little vulgar, sharp.
Dennehy doesn’t sound like a kid at all. In fact, he is flat
and bland, his expression doesn’t change through the years.
He seems nailed to his square shoulders, stiff, immovable. He raises
some emotion only near the end of the 90-minute play. It’s a
disappointment from an actor who has done brilliant stage acting,
memorably in Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman"
in 1999 and Eugene O’Neill’s "Long Day’s Journey
into Night" in 2003.
Director Gregory Mosher does a terrific job with Farrow but should
have gotten more of a performance out of Dennehy.
Andy has always been sweet on Melissa, but she doesn’t want
to connect. He goes to Yale, she to Briarcliff, a rich girls’
finishing school in Westchester County.
When Andy is not available for a college weekend, she writes, "Je
suis désolée." Whether it’s deliberate to
show her poor French (a subtle choice) or just the actor or director’s
lack of the language, Melissa mispronounces it as désolée
(s) instead of dézolée (z).
Melissa goes to Florence to express what is trivialized as a dabbler’s
interest in art. Andy joins the Navy. He becomes a lawyer, she an
artist. She makes a bad marriage with a Wall Streeter. She drinks.
She segues from painting, to pottery, to photography, a dilettante
and failure at all. The back story is that she messed up her life
by not accepting the love of this terrific guy.
He becomes a Republican politician and is pompous, boring. Maybe that
goes with the territory. Except his demeanor hasn’t altered
since the second grade. Farrow is acting, he is not. Still, it’s
worth seeing the play for Farrow. What a career-topping, stunning
performance she gives!
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