prol og u e from the Artistic Director
I’ve always been fascinated by letters.
And I don’t mean email. I’m dating myself here, obviously. People under the age of 30 have no memory of waiting by the mailbox for a letter from a distant friend or a loved one, the excitement of tearing open the envelope, or of trying to decipher every single word written in longhand in a cursive style that uniquely identified the writer. Back in the day when you knew the name of your mailman, letters were a way of marking time, marking the changes, both little and big, in the ebb and flow of our lives. They were the cradle of some of our deepest, most intimate thoughts and feelings, conveyors of a kind of rarified speech capable of expressing things that no other form of communication could bear. Dear Elizabeth is a chronicle of a 30-year relationship between two great poets told entirely through the exchange of letters. The sweep of the letters provides a window into two extraordinary minds, as well as a portrait of two small human beings struggling to make their way through life. Unlike a biography, or a fictional drama, or a film, the great virtue of sticking solely to the letters is that it allows us to fill in the spaces in between. We become each character, obsessing over what’s been said and what each author chose not to include. Why didn’t she tell me that? Why hasn’t he written in so long? Why is this letter so short? My god, it’s good to finally hear from you! I rejoice upon hearing from you! Your letter was a great relief, was deeply troubling, was so exciting, cleft my heart in two…. But using letters as the only material for a stage play is also seriously challenging. It requires artists of great skill, possessed of enough intelligence and creativity to transmute the descriptions on the page into a series of compelling dramatic actions. Fortunately, the wonderful Sarah Ruhl and our beloved colleague Les Waters have returned to grace us with their talents. Both Les and Sarah are comfortable in “the spaces in between.” They’ve spent much of their creative lives studying what we say to each other and what we don’t. Together they leap into the task of making the letters three dimensional, joined by a special design team and consummate actors Mary Beth Fisher and Tom Nelis. We are the lucky recipients of their discoveries. Sincerely,
Tony Taccone
REPRESENTING THE FINEST EAST BAY HOMES
Berkeley ◆ Kensington El Cerrito ◆ Albany Piedmont ◆ Oakland
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The GRUBB Co. R E A L T O R S
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