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Theatre Cambrian's latest is a strange little love affair

Love Letters is a unique and imaginative theatre piece which, in the words of the author, "needs no theatre, no lengthy rehearsal, no special set, no memorization of lines, and no commitment from its two actors beyond the night of performance.
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Theatre Cambrian is staging Love Letters August 7 and 8 at 8 p.m. Supplied photo.
Love Letters is a unique and imaginative theatre piece which, in the words of the author, "needs no theatre, no lengthy rehearsal, no special set, no memorization of lines, and no commitment from its two actors beyond the night of performance."

The piece is comprised of letters exchanged over a lifetime between two people who grew up together, went their separate ways, but continued to share confidences.

As the actors read the letters aloud, what is created is an evocative, touching, frequently funny — but always telling — pair of character studies in which what is implied is as revealing and meaningful as what is actually written down.

After all these years, Gurney’s bittersweet love letter to an oddly matched couple who maintain an epistolary friendship for half a century can still tug at the old heartstrings. Especially when handled with great delicacy by pros like local actors Dale Pepin and Shirley Tye.

The staging is minimal and the structure is simplicity itself: Two actors, a man and a woman of a certain age, sit side by side at a sturdy wooden table, but never interact as they read from old letters, postcards, notes and seasonal greeting cards (i.e., their scripts). Under the director of Mark Mannisto, the spell is never broken.

The first letter, written in 1937, comes from Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, who “accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Channing Gardner for a birthday party in honour of their daughter, Melissa.”

What Andy doesn’t mention in his letter, but which soon becomes apparent, is that Master Andy fell in love with Miss Melissa the moment she walked into his Grade 2 class. (“You looked like a lost princess,” he tells her early in their correspondence.)

Andy is a good little boy, a very serious child who already feels the weight of his filial obligations to his stern father, and that is exactly how Pepin plays him from the beginning, as a little man in the body of a six-year-old boy.

Melissa is another story. This fiercely independent girl, the child of uneasily divorced parents, is a born rebel, a real little devil, and Tye grabs that naughtiness by the tail and never lets it go.

Practically the first thing she tells Andy is not to write her any more letters. But Andy has found his princess and before they make it into third grade, he’s already asking her to marry him.

On some level, he already senses her wildness corrects his little-old-man stuffiness.

These are rich kids (in Melissa’s case, very rich, indeed), so their growing friendship takes place within the context of their privileged WASP social class: nursemaids, boarding school, dancing school, child psychiatrists, summer camp in the Adirondacks.

Then it’s on to Yale and Harvard Law for straight-arrow Andy, and to various schools for Melissa, who has distinct artistic leanings, but keeps getting kicked out of school.

Tye is wonderful at taking Melissa through the downward trajectory of her life, and very protective about her keen intelligence and clear insights.

“You’re always doing just the right thing all the time,” she writes Andy. “You’re a victim of your parents, sometimes.”

And just to make sure he gets the message, she sends him a sketch of a dancing bear on a chain.

By the time they’re finished with their schooling and are working on their first marriages, Andy and Melissa have grown miles apart. But neither one can quite let go of the other, and no matter how frayed the bond, their friendship lives on — remarkably, for 50 years — through their letters.

In his carefully modulated, authorial voice, Gurney makes it quite clear that his mismatched pair are the yin and yang of a perfectly balanced relationship. That they complete one another. That they can’t live without each other. And how sad it is that whenever one of them gets the message, the other one never seems to be around to hear it.

Theatre Cambrian is staging Love Letters August 7 and 8 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 each and can be purchased online at www.theatrecambrian.ca or by phoning 705-524-7317.

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