A Love Letter to Love Letters (Or Why I Am Still Obsessed with Love Letters at the Irish Rep )

This is my second of two posts about Love Letters at the Irish Rep...reposted here from my blog.

This comes as no great surprise to people who know me: I love the theater. When I was a kid, my grandmother used to take me and my siblings to Christmas plays and pantomimes. When I was about ten, living in Sheffield, I was the very last person on a very long list (the backup backup) to get tickets from a group managed by my parents’ friends. It was a thrill each and every time to go out to the Crucible or the Lyceum (then very good theaters) on a school night, to get dressed up and stay out until past ten. It’s not difficult to understand why theater, still, is so magical to me. 

I’m also a theater snob. Despite roughly ten years of domestic troubles from my late teens to early thirties, I was lucky enough to see a whole lot of really exceptional theater on my shoestring budget. I saw Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in David Hare’s A Breath of Life (a play specifically written for them). I saw Glenn Close in A Streetcar Named Desire at the National Theatre. I saw Kristen Scott Thomas twice; Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush; Helen Mirren in The Audience. Living in Cambridge, I dragged my kids to see shows at the ADC, which gave the likes of Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, and Stephen Fry their start, and in Stratford. I also walked out of a horrendous production of Hamlet and hold a grudge for the handful of other atrocious performances I’ve seen, including a version of The Crucible so bad that it was funny. 

Good theater is something I prioritized, though, because I believe in its inherent value. What that value is is perhaps difficult to articulate in an age of 24-hour entertainment, but I think it endures. In the class I’m taking at NYU, we were discussing how Plato considered theaters dangerous because they empowered audience members to believe that they had power within the state. He wasn’t a fan of the so-called theaterocracy, and perhaps we shouldn’t be either. If theaterocracy is the practice of dramatizing the public, as several scholarly discussions suggest, then maybe we do need to steer clear? Actually, the White House Press Secretary called out the Speaker of the House today for suggesting that he wouldn’t take a salary during a government shutdown when, in fact, he has to, according to the Constitution. But maybe it is just an extension of the social media age, in which so many people seem to spend their time emoting their way through life. 

Obviously, good theater is about much more than this. Like other art forms, theater is considered and developed through the input of many. Through its approach to storytelling, it also builds empathy – the capacity to understand what other people feel. Sometimes it even teaches empathy and allows us to modify our behavior based on the new understanding it inspires. Through a kind of empowerment, theater can also convince us that we have some control over our actions and how we behave toward others. It teaches awareness and invites us to reconsider some of our prejudices and expectations. 

In fact, Kenneth Lonergan writes about how “theatre audiences…can’t help but approach every play they attend encumbered by their own slew of opinions, most of which have little or no bearing on what they are about to watch” (ix), but that “we get more out of the theatre when our eyes are open to more of what the theatre has to offer; and it’s better for our souls” (ix). This holds for literature, too, of course, and perhaps especially for novels. Much of my dissertation explored the ways in which early readers and critics completely misread the works of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. 

These musings are what bring me to Love Letters one last time, though, and to the fact that I’ve now seen it performed six times in as many days at the Irish Rep. 

In a previous post, I talked about what I love about this play as a text, and I have more to say on that, believe me, because the more I have seen it and read it, the more I have noticed. But here I want to talk about the particular production and the performances of the second cast at the Irish Rep, J. Smith-Cameron as Melissa Gardner and Victor Garber as Andrew Ladd, who were nothing short of spectacular.

First, I want to say something about the production as a whole, by which I mean the play itself rather more than the particular space of the Irish Rep, although I will come to that. One of my students commented on Friday morning that she wished that the earlier letters of the play had been read by children roughly the age of the characters at the time they wrote the letters. I respectfully disagree, for several reasons. First, I don’t know that I would trust even a very experienced child-actor to read the letters with the appropriate nuance and humor. Shakespeare knew to adjust his plays to fit the talents of his particular actors, and writing for what we can assume were younger, less experienced actors, he almost invariably seems to have simplified things. Assuming children often played fairies, for example, the heavy rhymes in A Midsummer Night’s Dreamdemonstrate this. 

Second, I think it is deliciously effective to have adult actors read the letters because, as Andy points out, one of the things about letters is that you can (and often do) reread them. I have letters from my grandmother, and a handful from teachers and students, that I have kept and that I sometimes reread. I have one letter from my favorite English professor from Harrisburg Area Community College (you know who you are), wishing me good luck as I was leaving for Cambridge. I also have one from my other favorite English professor, sent to me when he heard that I was unhappy back in England, telling me how proud he was of me. These letters can be like candles in the dark when you’re feeling even a little bit down, so I can imagine Melissa and Andy as adults rereading the notes that they sent to each other as children. Andy imagining Melissa after her death somewhat also fits with this idea, too, and it is the approach taken in the film. An adult Andy imagines Melissa as an adult, the age she died, reading back over the letters with him. Although never articulated as a feature of the play, I think you can argue that it is one way to conceptualize what is happening on stage in front of us, the audience. 

Now for the production at the Irish Rep. This is my first time at the Rep and, as I have probably demonstrated on Twitter enough, I love this theater. I love it because it is the first and, so far, only theater to have offered, very willingly, a whole lot of student tickets. I tried to get tickets for my classes to see Ralph Fiennes in Straight Line Crazy, the play based on the life of Robert Moses. That went horribly awry when the box office sold the tickets that the theater had already distributed to my students, supposedly for free. The law student in me wishes the theater had charged us the $10 so that they couldn’t then sell the tickets from under us. 

I also tried getting tickets for Prima Facie, which I thought my students should see for more reasons than just Jodie Comer, although she is fantastic and rightly won every award for it. It was a breathtaking performance and one of the most amazing pieces of theater I have ever seen. No joy with student tickets, though, and my classes can’t afford to pay the $75 per ticket, which was only the starting prices when the tickets went on sale.

So the Irish Rep wins for making the theater accessible. It also wins for having a stellar performance of Love LettersSeptember 19^th to 24^th, with Smith-Cameron and Garber, and yes, I have seen it an embarrassing number of times at this point. In my defense, though, I was escorting students most of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday), and the weekend I reserved for me, my daughter, and my friend. 

But what makes this performance so good? Someone outside the theater tonight said that they had performed the play and seen it done with other casts. They said that Smith-Cameron and Garber were the best pairing. I agree, although I’ve only seen the movie version to compare. I genuinely can’t imagine any other couple pulling this off the way these two do, and there are several reasons for this. 

First, let’s talk about Garber’s Andy. I imagine that Andy is quite a tricky character to translate from the page. He’s stuffy and pretentious, trying to live up to his parents’ (especially his father’s) expectations, but he’s also got an energy and a streak of the rebellious. After all, he does carry on a relationship with a “Geisha girl,” and he has an affair with Melissa, however, brief. Both of those things very much go against the wholesome family values that he grows up with. We know his parents are appalled by his relationship with the Japanese woman, and his relationship with Melissa causes a scandal in the papers.

In the film version, Andy is very neat, polished, and shiny. Although I like the film, I felt that the casting was ever so slightly off. Perhaps it’s because, at one point, Melissa’s mother says that Andy is a “diamond in the rough” and Andy himself promises Melissa he will write when he is “smoother.” Garber manages to have the right edge about him. I don’t know whether it’s because he’s older and seems worldlier, or just that he can pull off Andy’s pretention so brilliantly coupled with a frustrated energy. 

I was really hoping to get a talkback with the actors for my students, and one of the questions we wanted to ask, which we’d discussed in class, was what exactly Andy wants. I think it’s easier to answer the question, what does he think he wants. I think he wants the ideal life that he carves for himself; he wants the fantasy of the perfect family, the perfect career, and the perfect romantic relationship with Melissa, maintained through letters that allow him to express himself, to give himself to her, as he says, without ever actually compromising his marriage. 

What he actually wants is more problematic, and this was a question I wanted to ask Mr. Garber. Does Andy ever realize, truly, that he loves Melissa? He says so in a letter to her mother. He admits that he has loved Melissa since he first saw her in second grade. That might sound overly sentimental, but one of my best friends is married to the guy she used to play house with in Kindergarten. They weren’t childhood sweethearts, either. They were in school together briefly, and then they met again in their early twenties, when he had come back from the Marines, and she was back from college. Go figure. 

But Andy also says this in a letter to Melissa’s mother, and he says that he is sad that he won’t ever be able to write to her again. He doesn’t say that he is sorry he won’t see her again, or actually be with her in person. My daughter is currently obsessed with Wuthering Heights and was watching the 1992 film version. We were discussing how the 2009 version makes Heathcliff’s reaction to Cathy’s death very weird and creepy because he kisses her dead body. In the 1992 film, though, Ralph Fiennes’s Heathcliff holds Cathy in his arms, hugging her really tightly and crying. It’s such a moving representation of the complexity of that relationship – childhood friends and lovers, much like Andy and Melissa. The difference, of course, is that Heathcliff is never oblivious to his own true feelings for Cathy.

What I particularly loved about Garber’s performance, though, was his comic timing. He managed to really emphasize the comedy when Andy berates Melissa for her behavior after her visit to his school when she “necks” with another boy. He does it again when he criticizes her wild behavior at the Campbells’ sports party. He also manages to be blatantly clueless when he suggests, embarrassed, that Melissa should check in with his former girlfriend after a failed attempt at sex: “It didn’t happen with Gretchen Lascelles. You can write and ask her.” (What every girl wants to hear, Andy!) He also mansplains like a champ with compelling obliviousness, telling Melissa that the guy has to worry about performance anxiety, and the girl not so much, even as it’s pretty clear that Melissa has more experience than he does in this department.

As for Smith-Cameron’s Melissa, well, I don’t know that I can imagine anyone else pulling off this role quiet so splendidly. Melissa isn’t an easy character, either; arguably, she’s even trickier. As I discussed in the previous blog post, she’s carrying a world of trauma around with her that she never quite learns to deal with. She is also intelligent, witty, critical, flirtatious, and rebellious. Her letters to Andy are often hyperbolic, emphatic, and short. Her character emerges as much through her reactions to Andy’s very long letters as through her own writing. She prefers the telephone, after all, and wants to see Andy in real life.

Watching the play over the week, I noticed a few ways that Smith-Cameron played with the character, all of which I loved. First, on Tuesday, she was relatively subdued. It felt like both actors, actually, were getting into the groove of the text. I am the kind of person who pays attention to weird little details, so I was intrigued by the water drinking – Tuesday it seemed much more about catching nerves, maybe, or just refocusing in the same way that tennis players bounce a certain number of times before getting back into a serve. Maybe I am way off with this, but it’s what I thought at the time. Then, on Wednesday, I noticed that both actors seemed to play around with the drinking. I think Wednesday was the night that Garber used the water to really pause before launching into an explanation to Melissa about why he was still writing to girls. Smith-Cameron was also playing with the glass, I think, too, drinking strategically, as Melissa listened to Andy go on. It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon, though, that Smith-Cameron played Melissa as drunk (which she clearly should be when writing several of her letters). Maybe I missed it in other performances, so take what I’m saying here with a grain of salt. It’s what it looked like to me as an audience member. But I was quietly cheering when Smith-Cameron started knocking back the water, even lifting up the glass and holding it against her face, suggesting Melissa’s drunkenness. 

Over the week, I really loved how the listening developed as well. Melissa seemed to become a more active listener as the performances progressed. By Sunday, there seemed to be very deliberate movements, leg shifts, hand movements, eyerolls. It was really brilliant, and absolutely spot on for Melissa’s character and the development of the story. Andy says at the end of the play that Melissa’s was the voice that he could hear when he did an inauthentic thing, and I think it really helps to see her appear less than impressed with his diatribes as a way of conveying this.

Another thing I liked about Smith-Cameron’s performance was how she managed to represent Melissa’s vulnerability. There are several key moments in the play when she reaches out to Andy. She mentions that her stepfather abuses her, that her mother drinks, that her husband is vindictive, and that she is struggling with alcoholism. She also asks for Andy’s help at various stages. She asks him to come and rescue her from school a couple of times. Later she asks him to help her try and get her girls back from her husband, who has taken custody. 

In all of these moments, Smith-Cameron showed Melissa as someone really needing compassion and help, reaching out to someone she knows, the one person she sees as helping her behave better and who she says is both her only friend and like a brother to her. Because the play is only performed as a reading, these moments are really it (except for the end) as far as pulling the audience’s heartstrings and getting everyone invested in the plot. So they have to carry. Personally, it’s what I think makes Smith-Cameron such an amazing actress, that she performs these tiny gestures, almost micro-expressions, which convey the vulnerability of her characters. It’s what made me love her performance in Succession, frankly, especially the lip-wobble in the episode that is, I think, put forward for the Emmys. It’s also interesting that these gestures carry both on screen and on stage, never looking overdone. 

The gestures changed over the course of the week, too. They became more pronounced, I think, on Wednesday, and then again on Saturday and Sunday. The performance also worked when they were downplayed. Melissa works as a character who is a bit stoic, too, holding back more than she gives away, sometimes, and it was nice to see that range of interpretation, too. I imagine it makes it more fun to alter performances in subtle ways, and it really did make it even more fun and interesting to watch. 

One thing I have been thinking about, though, now almost a week out from the last performance I saw, is what exactly it is that Melissa wants and whether, in the end, getting it would really save her. Of course, the metaphor of the lost princess, worked throughout the text, suggests that Melissa needs saving and she looks to Andy to do it; she calls him “mon chevalier” at one point, meaning knight or gentleman. The connotation is certainly romantic and in keeping with the idea of the knight and his lady, a mostly platonic relationship about honor and worship of the idealized female, if I can indulge in a bit of medieval literary scholarship. This, in part, is a reflection of the problem of Andy’s idealization of Melissa. He imagines himself as “a true lover” writing to his lady from a distance, weaving a heart-breaking romance of self-denial as he goes. I’ve already said, I think, how telling it is that he misses the idea of writing to Melissa after her death, not talking to her or seeing her. After the end of their affair, he also says, by way of reassurance and as a consolation, that they can still write to each other: “Mrs. Walpole is still with us.” (Good grief, man!)

Melissa begs for more contact, more face-to-face. She implies that she wants Andy to divorce Jane and marry her (“other politicians have gotten divorced,” she says). But assuming that she and Andy did get married, would it follow that her problems would suddenly evaporate? First, I want to say that Andy’s excuse that they’re too old is clearly nonsense. Melissa’s mother remarries at 82. My own grandmother had her happy ending in her 80s with the guy who proposed to her when she was 18. It’s not a George Eliot quote, it’s misattributed to her, even by the New York Public Library but “it’s never too late to become what you might have been.” But does it follow that Andy and Melissa might have been happy together? I don’t know. I’m not convinced. And I don’t think the problem here is Melissa, either. The problem, I think, lies squarely with Andy, who appears to lead an ideal life, masquerading as the family man and “stalwart upright servant of the people.” 

Yet, from what he admits to Melissa, his marriage is mostly unhappy, and two of his kids are struggling with some family issues of their own. Even more seriously, we see Andy ignore Melissa’s appeals for help, and if we put this in context, it suggests that he is perhaps a bit like Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice when it comes both to parenting and his love life. If you know the story but haven’t thought about Mr. Bennet as more of a problem parent than his wife, consider this: Mrs. Bennet asks her husband to go and visit Mr. Bingley – an eligible young man who just moved into the neighborhood. Mr. Bennet’s response is to say that he won’t, teasing his wife, yes, but also, by doing so, refusing to take seriously her very real anxiety about what will happen to their family when he, the head of the household, dies. Mr. Bennet persistently dismisses his wife’s concerns and belittles his daughters even as he refuses to parent them. Andy, I would argue, shows some of the same tendencies, even in the snippets of his family life that we are privy to. For example, he suggests that his wife has a tendency toward melodrama. Does she, though? She worries that he’s writing love letters to Melissa. Oh, wait. He is. Especially if you consider his whole ideal about the “true lover” – the letters are love letters even before the affair begins. In fact, his wife isn’t really being melodramatic. She’s reacting to her husband’s emotional affair, which he’s carrying on right in front of her. 

I think Andy’s refusal to help Melissa at least get a better custody arrangement with her kids is the most unforgivable of his moves. I loved the way Smith-Cameron played this out – pleading with Andy and then, in her next letter, after his refusal, bouncing back by saying that she’s in Egypt, in the cradle of civilization. Of course, it’s not a valid move to say that you could be a better parent if you only had the legal responsibility, so maybe that’s why Andy really says no to helping. However, it would certainly be possible to work on healing the relationship between Melissa and her kids if there was less alienation going on and if the ex-husband had less control. Perhaps I’m also just not a fan of ex-husbands.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I thought the Irish Rep’s second casting was brilliant. I am sure the other two from this production were great as well, but I’m a die-hard fan of Smith-Cameron’s performance, especially, because I came away from each production heartbroken, but also wishing that Melissa had more people looking out for her. Catharsis achieved.