X X O O Theatre Memphis’ likeable version of Love Letters gets lost in the mail. by Chris Davis n his introduction, playwright A.R. Gurney states that Love Letters is a play about writing; a claim that the epistolary nature of the script only superficially supports. As the two characters fall in and out of love (with each other), trouble, and marriage (to other people), they do occasionally debate the virtues of letter-writing. But this supports Gurney’s claim only to the degree that Blanche’s death wish makes A Streetcar Named Desire a play about unclean grapes. If Gurney is correct and Love Letters is about writing, then there must be something independent of the script – some external agent – that makes it so. That elusive agent to which I refer is the performance. While the actors in Theatre Memphis’ production of Love Letters give lively and animated performances, director Louise Levin never explores the possibility of a relationship between the characters and the letters they write. Without this element, the play’s focus shifts from writing to reading. The actors read us the story of their characters. It is a good reading – but that is not the same thing as good acting. In a letter excusing their coital incompatibility, Melissa Gardner (played by a well-spoken, well-meaning but hopelessly miscast and frumpishly costumed Martha Graber) says, “This letter writing has messed us up. … It’s made us seem like people we’re not. … There were two people missing in the Hotel Duncan that night: namely, the real you and the real me.” – ah, the rub. Communicating only through letters, the actors must work together, all the while making the letters their scene partners. There are so many ways people relate to the words they scribble on a page. A well-turned phrase might lead the author to take up the paper and marvel at the shape of a favored scrawl, while an “I” dotted in anger can put a hole clean through the desktop. Sometimes the right word never comes. And sometimes, when the right word does appear, it releases an avalanche of ideas and passionate verbiage that had been trapped inside the author until that first lucky word escaped the pen. These giddy highs and excruciating lows in the action are necessary to save Gurney’s cleverly crafted script from its movie-of-the-week storyline. In TM’s production the bulky and impersonal three-ring binders that hold the actor’s scripts (and sometimes their full attention) prevent anything of the sort from ever happening. In her director’s notes, Louise Levin addresses Love Letters’ “facility.” Really, Louise, hubris is so last millennium. As the ultra-rich free-spirited artist with a taste for liquor-soaked pills and the company of strangers, Martha Graber can never cut loose. There are overtones of spinster librarian in even her bawdiest lines. Uncomfortable with her exclamations, Graber swallows many wonderful words that should have been belted to the back row. She does convincingly recreate the slurred speech and nodding head of the overly tranquilized as the play arcs toward tragedy, but performance-wise it seems to come from nowhere. Either actor Graber or director Levin has chosen only to show us the pathetic final stage of Melissa’s addiction. We get to see her pay the piper but we never hear the tune. Michael Fortner, in the role of wealthy, WASPy Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, fares better. He is a big-toothed gangle of a man with the endearing awkwardness of an adolescent who has grown too fast. He is articulate and his reading is thoughtful but ultimately one-dimensional. Fortner never gets a handle on his character’s vanity. Ladd is a politician born who creates a perfected image of himself in the letters he writes – and falls in love with that image. Story sound familiar? Immobile from the armpits down, the actors never move from their seated position (a precedent set by the original production), though stasis is by no means a textual requirement. How nice it would have been to see Graber and Fortner as children sprawled underneath the table furiously writing notes to one another and to watch their spatial relationships change with time and circumstance. Minimalism is after all about economy – not poverty. Had Levin encouraged her actors to thoroughly memorize their lines, so that the reading (or writing) of the letters was a physically committed dramatic action rather than a contrived and occasionally faltering reality, Love Letters could have been a real charmer – instead it’s just a couple of air-conditioned hours spent in the dark.