Review of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company
Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth, now playing at New Haven Theater Company for four more performances—tonight and next Thursday through Saturday—has an unusual remit: to present the story of the friendship between Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) and Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) using only excerpts from the published correspondence between the two famous poets as text to be spoken by the actors playing them. The sense of this restriction is that it lets us hear the voices of these two inestimable writers as pitched to one another, an ongoing verbal pas de deux that lasted thirty years. Indeed, the last letter Bishop wrote Lowell was en route to him in New York when he died of a heart-attack in a cab in 1977. Bishop died two years later.
The premiere production of Dear Elizabeth, at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012 directed by Les Waters, had a wealth of interesting visual aids to hold our attention. At New Haven Theater Company, director J. Kevin Smith provides a much more intimate approach that has its own very choice theatricality. Set up with seating on all four sides, the play happens before us as an imagined space, one that Lowell and Bishop seemingly enter into readily. Their letters—usually written when considerable distance separates them in life—provide a particular intimacy that each strove to maintain, in different ways at different times. There are dramatized moments—such as their mimed meetings when we don’t get to hear them speak because what they said was not recorded—and moments of whimsy as when one or the other climbs a step latter as though to move above and beyond the quotidian bounds of life.
Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez), Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company
Moving chronologically through this literary acquaintance that becomes a lifelong friendship, we see how the two began, early on, with belief in one another as readers of and commentators on each other’s work. An aspect that never flags, with each dedicating poems to one another, and, late in Lowell’s career, arguing good naturedly but pointedly over Lowell’s use of doctored versions of his former (second) wife’s correspondence in his long poem “The Dolphin.” The “mixing of fact and fiction” is what Bishop objects to, so we can imagine that she would not censure Ruhl’s use of the poets’ correspondence since—though the play does not show us all that was said—the playwright uses only what was actually written. (Though on the question of tampering with written materials—which Bishop also faulted Lowell for—I will offer one cavil: to quote at length from Lowell’s famous poem “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to Bishop, without including the lines about the skunk not only truncates a powerful poem, but leaves those unfamiliar with the poem uncertain about what Lowell means when he said, in a letter, that he had become a skunk.)
Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company
The notion of the correspondence as a drama is supported by the way the two seem to require one another as audience to lives that move along with much travel and, for Lowell, three wives and two children, and, for Bishop, much time alone and then a long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, living together in Brazil, that ended tragically. The friendship between Lowell and Bishop had its more intense phase before Lowell met wife number two, Elizabeth Hardwick, author, critic and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books. Indeed, a powerful letter later in the play shows Lowell giving vent to reminiscence over the early possibility of a marriage to Bishop, whom he met before he met Hardwick. The possibility may have been only in his mind, but as depicted by the play, the earlier moment, when Lowell writes of meeting Hardwick and soon enough is enacting a marriage, finds Bishop sitting at her desk blowing bubbles and seeming to ignore his epistles. Was there ever a chance for these two to live as a settled couple? Doubtful, but, the play suggests, not unimaginable.
How we see this relationship owes much to how it’s staged. The strictures of the play make the audience seem to be reading the words of the poets over the shoulder of the playwright. Ruhl chooses what to include and what to exclude and provides terse statements of fact in a voice-over so that we will know things the letters don’t spell out. In addition, a silent factotum, called Brigit (Abby Klein, wonderfully focused) moves on and offstage, bringing in and removing props, aiding and abetting the dramatic business in a manner that seems to comment ironically on the fact that Lowell and Bishop have gone from living confidantes and career poets—each winning many important prizes—to figures in a play.
Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) in Dear Elizabeth, photo by New Haven Theater Company
As characters, Rodriguez’s Bishop is the more winning of the two. Rodriguez infuses Bishop with a vital circumspection, a way of approaching life as though it’s happening to someone else. So those moments when she breaks down are all the more powerful as we see at once with what strength of purpose she pursued her very individual life. As Lowell, Buonocore never quite gets across the manic quality in Lowell, which he references in his letters—having not only to take medications but sometimes being relegated to sanitariums. In Lowell’s words one detects a performative quality that does lend itself well to those passages where Buonocore’s Lowell comments drily on others.
The main strength of the play is that it makes us aware of how any attempt to present oneself in a verbal medium begs a certain indulgence from the audience. An audience of one—the person addressed—has now become “the ages,” leaving us to make of these lives what we will. There’s a very successful moment late in the play when Lowell and Bishop circle one another reciting the various salutations and closings they had used with one another in the course of thirty years of letters. The lines compose a poem with very specific referents and contexts, full of affection, self-aware humor and a very, very personal touch, such as only real friends can appreciate between each other.
Dear Elizabeth
A play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith
Producer: Margaret Mann; Production Stage Manager: Stacy Lupo; Lighting Designer: Adam Lobelson; Sound Effects: Tom Curley
Cast: Ralph Buonocore, Abby Klein, Sandra E. Rodriguez
New Haven Theater Company
November 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 2024