Photo by Carol Rosegg

by Eugene Paul

His name is Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and hers is Melissa Gardner.  They’re rich, American bluebloods, A.R. Gurney’s names and identities for his two characters, but that’s as may be, because the instant Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy come on, that is it, that’s who they really are and that’s who we’ve come to see.  Doyenne costume designer Jane Greenwood has done nothing to edge our stars toward the characters they’re going to portray because what’s the point?  Yet master stage setting designer John Lee Beatty has crafted an apparently empty stage, which, of course, is not, up front, simple country spindle back chairs, simple deal table. Lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski spreads his touch everywhere without appearing to, pure stagecraft.

Andrew and Melissa –Mia and Brian -- are going to read from a life time of letters to each other and we are not expecting either Farrow or Dennehy to keep changing clothes, hair, etc.  As they age as they read at/to each other from age eight onwards. It’s fascinating to see Dennehy read boy stuff in an old, crotchety voice, blending distant past and present, but you’ve got to get into it with him to feel the full swing of time and perspective and once you do, it’s troublingly touching.  You feel a vulnerability we all endure and never voice.  And there it is.

Not so with Farrow.  She’s so deeply poor little rich girl she almost compensates completely for her superbly beautiful, active though tired presence in middle age.  Who she is and what she is have become part and parcel of Melissa Gardner and vice versa and that’s what we’re enthralled to see. She remains so focused in her vision she never seems quite to listen to her stage partner or turn to him until her movingly exposed ending, whereas Dennehy cannot stop keying into her.  Long before he flatly declares his love for her we’ve known it.

It isn’t an easy thing for him to do.  Andrew Makepeace Ladd III is raised not to show emotion, in fact, not express anything much outside of propriety’s rules of his class. But A.R. Gurney, playwright, loves writing letters.  He spills it all out in the compulsion of Andrew’s character to write, write, write because it is here he says what he cannot say in the course of everyday life in the family, his family.

Nor can Melissa/Mia. The shameful moments, the un-niceties crop out, the bursts of emotion she cannot share elsewhere.  Yet, how can we feel sorry for this rich, privileged, beautiful dimwit of a person we have little or nothing in common with?  But we do.  Because, above all else, we’re inseparably human.  And that’s what Farrow captures and conks us with, haplessly feminine, crushed to vulnerability by the iron wall of inbred, inculcated rigidity Andrew knows he has to live by.

And that’s why Love Letters, old fashioned Gurney’s transparently sentimental play still hooks into us jaded, post modern, cynical, rootless, keelless, self-protective members of a society that gazes with fascination on these examples of people we thought we might have known and never did.  Nevertheless, yes, it’s the stars, the reading stars, that get us here... Director Gregory Mosher seems to have waved his seasoned hands over this production to lend us the security of his guidance even tough nothing sticks out, nothing shouts at us, which is very as it should be. Yes, we learn something about Andrew and Melissa, and Brian and Mia, but also about ourselves, our hidden romantic selves, even though we may never have written ourselves into our love letters. Pure stagecraft.  Nothing like it.

Love Letters. At the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 West 47^th Street.  Tickets: $52-$127. $37 Rush. 212-239-6200.