Preview of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company
The work of poets Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Robert Lowell (1917-1977) is often discussed together because of the strong affinities the two writers had for each other and one another’s work. In the era since their deaths—two years apart—Bishop’s work has somewhat eclipsed Lowell’s, though he was a much better-known figure during their lifetimes, from an august Boston Brahmin family that traced its ancestors back to the Mayflower. Both poets won Pulitzers and National Book Awards, and both had great influence on subsequent generations of poets through their publications and teaching. The degree to which their actual personalities inflected their poetic personae is a question of their ongoing interpretation, and both have dedicated fans enamored of the unique musics of their verses.
The two are even more inextricably linked posthumously because of Sarah Ruhl’s play, Dear Elizabeth (first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Les Waters, in 2012), which will be revived this week and next by the New Haven Theater Company. The play derives from Words in Air, a 2008 volume that collects the complete correspondence—over 450 letters—between Bishop and Lowell, written from 1947 to 1977. Dramatized by two actors playing the poets and speaking lines the poets respectively wrote each other, Bishop and Lowell become eloquent and—in the wide range of their lives—exemplary figures for their literary generation.
J. Kevin Smith, a longtime member of NHTC, directs the play which runs November 7, 8, 9 and 14, 15, 16. Dear Elizabeth, he reminded me, was originally scheduled as a script-in-hand read last year at this time, with two different casts slated to play Bishop and Lowell. Of that run, which was scrapped when one of the participants was unable to perform, Ralph Buonocore has been retained to play Robert Lowell. Ralph had a small but essential role in last NHTC season’s success Webster’s Bitch and was memorable, several seasons ago, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Sandra Rodriquez, a veteran of NHTC having appeared in The Cult, Trevor, and most recently Goldfish, will be playing Elizabeth Bishop. They are joined by Abby Klein, who also played in Webster’s Bitch, as Brigit.
For Smith, the move to a full production for the play, as opposed to a staged reading, comes from a fuller immersion in the play and consideration of the kinds of stage directions Sarah Ruhl works into the text. He mentioned that Ruhl’s Foreword to the play suggests that the play could be done in a very scaled-down version, as for instance “a book club reading.” The Yale Repertory Theatre version was nothing like that, featuring water running on stage and levitating props, and Smith sees much potential for a version of the play somewhere between special effects and no effects.
He sees “magical realism” in what Ruhl writes about what happens onstage and feels the NHTC production will “facilitate the magic of the play,” which is a matter of “mood and how it is created” in a story that spans thirty years and though “platonic is passionate.” Particularly “compelling” for Smith is how Bishop and Lowell “do the dance of their relationship,” which at one point stirs from Lowell a love letter that Ruhl called “one of the most beautiful love letters ever written.” Ruhl, Smith said, became enamored of the correspondence when a friend gave her the book when she was under bed-rest while pregnant with twins. The playwright became convinced that the words in the letters needed to be heard aloud, and wrote a play to dramatize the unique nature of this enduring friendship.
As Ruhl says in her Foreword to the play: “It’s difficult to write about friendship. Our culture is inundated with the story of romantic love. We understand how romantic love begins, how it ends. We don’t understand, in neat narrative fashion, how friendship begins, how it endures. And yet life would be unbearable without friendship.”
Dear Elizabeth is about how friendship made the highly fraught lives of two highly wrought poets more bearable and, in their letters, indelible.
Dear Elizabeth
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith
New Haven Theater Company
Thursday, November 7 & 14 at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, November 8 & 15 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, November 9 & 16 at 8 p.m.
839 Chapel Street, New Haven