One-night show explores living through letters

“Love Letters”

Nov. 19 at 8 p.m.

Directed by Lofty Durham

Charity Randall…

“Love Letters”

Nov. 19 at 8 p.m.

Directed by Lofty Durham

Charity Randall Theatre, Stephen Foster Memorial

412-624-PLAY

Ever gone through your old childhood things and found a note written to you from your old crush? You know, the one that said, “Check here if you like me?” Well, imagine 40 years’ worth of correspondence from that person.

In A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” we follow the lives of two people told entirely through their letters. Beginning with birthday thank you notes and postcards from summer camp, Andrew Makepeace Ladd III (Doug Mertz) and Melissa Gardner (Mary Schafer Masterman) unknowingly begin an exchange that will continue throughout their lives.

Sharing similar childhoods of wealth and privilege, their lives take very different turns as Andrew goes off to Yale and later to war and Melissa flunks out of school and gets married. Through the unexpected paths their lives take, the letters remain a constant – at times comforting and at times painful – but always there. It is through what is both written and left unsaid, that the audience, and even Andrew and Melissa themselves, come to realize what their relationship has truly meant.

This one-night-only performance, orchestrated by Masterman, an adjunct faculty member in Pitt’s Theatre Arts department, will benefit the American Stroke Association. Masterman became actively involved in fundraising for the organization as a way to deal with her own helplessness after her father suffered a debilitating stroke three weeks prior to his retirement.

The stage reading of “Love Letters” will surely remind us all of the importance of seizing each and every moment. Forty years is just too long to wait to tell someone how you really feel.