'Love letters' straight from the heart

No halfway houses with the Suburban Players – when not raising the bar (and the roof) with West Side Story with dozens of people on stage most of the time in late July, they go to the other extreme with an ultra-minimalist play consisting of two actors, two tables, two chairs and little else.

Such was Hugo Halbrich’s rendering of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters last weekend from Friday through to Sunday. Which sounds about as exciting as President Javier Milei pontificating about his budget on the same evening as the last night’s performance – what could recommend this obscure playwright to an Argentine audience other than his initials (ARG)?

Yet the play had a discreet charm not to be found in Congress last Sunday night. What was its secret? Gurney’s biting script – tragicomic but far more the latter half of that word than the former? Or the ability of Halbrich’s subtly nuanced direction to coax his actors into squeezing plenty of drama out of a play anything but dramatic? Or the actors themselves (more on them below)? Last but not least, the cosy intimacy of the tiny original 70-seat Suburban Players theatre in San Isidro (Moreno 80) – the perfect setting for a miniscule cast on a minute stage. Probably a combo of all of the above.

The always sedentary actors did nothing all night but read out of sheets of paper just like President Milei last Sunday but what a difference! The facial expressions, the variety of tone and (sometimes the most eloquent of all) the administration of silence all lent life to the script – good acting well directed. Michael James Fortino, playing the Yale Republican and eventually two-term senator Andrew Ladd Junior, last May contributed the only serious note to the farce Who’s in Bed with the Butler? as the single-minded legal beagle Mark Vance (presumably no relation to Donald Trump’s running-mate) – Fortino would thus seem to specialise in portraying the uptight although his Andrew, labelled as “straitlaced” in the Suburban Players flyer, could be more accurately described as smug or priggish. Ximena Faralla is perfect as the rebellious and artistic Melissa Gardner, always testing the limits of her narrow society but never stepping beyond the brink until the end – her accent is Mid-Atlantic in a triangular rather than the usual dual sense but who cares if she gets her character across?

This review began by underlining the contrasts between West Side Story and Love Letters but in a deeper sense they are very similar – both are Romeo and Juliet adapted to the New York City of six or seven decades ago. With the difference, of course, that Andrew and Melissa are not West Side lumpenproletarian gang members embroiled in a turf war but highly individualistic and elitist Upper East Siders. The plot is nothing more or less than their exchange of correspondence over roughly four decades between schooldays and middle age in a period during which a decadent ‘WASP’ (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) upper crust was steadily losing its grip on the United States. The epistolary theme is very similar to that poignant film 84, Charing Cross Road starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins but rather less platonic.

Last but not least, some Chinese whispers over the timetable saw this reviewer arriving over 90 minutes early but it was a happy accident permitting an insight into the many inputs which go into a play, not just the end product. The Times talked to Halbrich himself (who directed this play early this century with a different pair of actors each night), to Carola Durlach (Agnes in Who’s in Bed with the Butler?) coming in to assist Production Manager Sylveen Smith along with Mechi Munton, to Edward Green looking after the light and sound together with Hans Biorklund  while Suburban Players president Joe Elverdin and Lexy Solá Claret had to match tickets to seats with Cynthia Hampton lining up the cocktails and sandwiches at the bar. 

If the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said: “International treaties are like sausages – you wouldn’t want to know what goes into them,” the ingredients of a Suburban Players production are rather more edifying.