Theatre Review: “Love Letters” Falls Short Of Expectations

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Andrew Makepeace Ladd III wrote his first letter to Melissa Gardner to tell her she looked like a lost princess. They were both seven years old. For the next fifty years, through personal triumphs and despair, through wars and marriages and children and careers, they poured out the secrets of their hearts to each other. They defied a fate that schemed to keep them apart, and lived for the one most meaningful thing, their undying love for each other.

Over the years, many actors from film, TV, and theatre have taken on the roles of Melisa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III in A.R. Gurney’s Pulitzer Prize-winning love story, “Love Letters.” No pairing of actors has been more anticipated than movie legends Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. The Winspear Opera House has taken great lengths to endorse the show with red carpet and press conference events.

Forty six years ago in 1970, MacGraw and O’Neal engraved themselves into everyone’s hearts and souls as the perfectly tragic couple in “Love Story.” The movie gave birth to the phrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” and forever branded the two actors as the perfect couple cheated by fate. For many of a certain age, all it takes is the opening few bars of music to the movie’s theme song to bring tears to the eye. “Love Letters” tells the story – albeit in a very unusual way – of two people who share a 50 year friendship and love affair. So very understandably, when MacGraw and O’Neal were announced as the new couple taking “Love Letters” on a national tour, much was anticipated.

The idea came to producers after reading an article in The Hollywood Reporter that pictured the co-stars together after 45 years. In that time, O’Neal and MacGraw have seen their fair share of ups and downs – rehab, divorces, deaths, not unlike the characters they play in “Love Letters.” The mix of nostalgia and real-life drama is a heady concoction laying down much of the emotional groundwork of the play before the curtain even opens.

The show is presented on a nearly bare stage. The two characters enter together, sit at a shared desk and begin reading the letters they exchanged starting at the age of seven and ending fifty years later. Although the actors share the same physical space, they are never in the same actual scene.

For the next 90 minutes, we listen to Melissa and Andy read the letters they exchanged from 1937 – 1987. Though she preferred the phone, he insisted and continued their communications through writing. The letters begin when both characters are seven. Both from very well-to-do families, we follow the two through awkward and painful childhoods with families that ship them off to boarding schools and summer camps in hopes of “turning out” respectable socially responsible adults. As the letters reveal, Melissa and Andy take very different paths.

We see Melissa become a failed artist, a divorced woman who loses custody of her children because of alcoholism, promiscuity, sarcasm and lacking focus or stability, but always clinging to her friendship with Andy. He, always trying to do what is expected of him, excels in school, goes to Yale, serves time in the Navy, becomes a lawyer, a married man with three children and eventually a U.S. Senator.

They couldn’t be more opposite in temperament and how they deal with life. They are apart far more than they are ever together, and when they finally do connect, it’s too late. Andy’s last letter, written to Melissa’s mother, spells out how much they truly gave, shared, and loved each other over the 50 years.

Over the course of 90 minutes, the letters capture the innocence of childhood, the uncertainties of adolescence, dynamics of self discovery and finally somber disappointment. Frank L. Baum’s “The Lost Princess Of Oz” becomes a metaphor for Melissa just as “Paradise” Lost describes the portrait of their relationship.

And now comes the part I have dragged my feet in writing. After painting a picture for you of how absolutely soul-moving the show can be, and the perfection of MacGraw and O’Neal being cast as Melissa and Andy, I have to explain why I walked away from the Winspear Opera House after opening night feeling… nothing. I never once really connected with Melissa and Andy’s tragic and heart-breaking lives. Halfway through the performance, I completely stopped caring what, if anything, would ever happen to them.

Although MacGraw offered the audience dynamic interpretations of Melissa as she read the letters, O’Neal was off his game, many times stumbling over lines and seaming to lose his place as he read the letters. Bear in mind, the script is completely comprised of the letters that each character is reading. Nothing is memorized and delivered as lines. It was suggested to me that perhaps the stumblings and stammers were intentional, but I don’t think so. His passages came across as a tired actor who needed to put more energy and time into his delivery.

Unlike the baby boomers in the audience, I have no connection to “Love Story” and the characters MacGraw and O’Neal played, so I entered the theater last night without “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” rose-tinted glasses. I rarely felt a connection between the two characters, and honestly had to keep myself from dozing off.

For the die-hard “Love Story,” MacGraw, and O’Neal fans, this is probably a show you will not want to miss. For the rest of us, unfortunately, I cannot endorse the time nor money spent watching it.

Now playing at the Winspear Opera House March 22 – April 3