Imagine two ideally suited lovers conducting their love affair for 50 years entirely by the written word. Are they for real or kidding themselves? Cowards or heroes? Comic or tragic figures?
These days, Edge of the World Theatre is exploring those and other questions by means of Director Michael Kelley, alternating casts (Eric and Paul Bergman, Stephanie McBain and Kevin Miller) and A.R. Gurney’s Pulitzer-nominated “Love Letters.” The combo makes for a winning mix of two hearts yearning for union and yanking apart. It takes you over.
At rock bottom, goings-on seat two actors side by side at a table, reading letters: those they receive and those they write and send. That’s it. No props, no sets, nothing except words and actors.
And innuendo, blatant outbursts, big successes, high hopes, broken dreams and heartfelt confessions of disappointment and realization.
And all of it laced together with references to 1930s-through-1980s America and life as it was lived from grade school through middle age by a man and woman born to high social position. Public as well as private life is spelled out, laid out and acted out.
I speculate Erica and Paul Bergman added an extra dimension to the performance I saw because they are in fact married. Erica as the poor little rich girl, Melissa, certainly does justice to the spontaneities, cynicism, affectations, air of ennui and general malaise associated with the upper two per cent. And Paul in no way detracts from the stuffiness and self-stifling image of Andy, a well-provided-for boy and man who plots out his life and doesn’t deviate.
However, together, the off stage couple on stage seem especially sensitive to the slights and hints of slights that so often go on between intimates. Their familiarity adds hilarity to the humor and depth to the drama. I don’t say Stephanie McBain and Kevin Miller in the same roles are any less effective. But the Bergmans score big in my book.
This is literate but not particularly eloquent romance. The sentiment is delicate, idealistic and chaste but not convincingly realistic. I found it pleasant to contemplate, funny and dramatic but ultimately geared to a world far less complex than the one we live in.
Recommended for an entertaining night out.
Reactions? Comments? Contact Dale Burrows at entopinion@heraldnet.com or grayghost7@comcast.net.
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