It’s possible to have an intense, deeply loving friendship with another person that exists entirely outside of one’s core romantic relationship. There even are circumstances wherein that relationship trumps the other, when history judges it as the one of more significance.
That’s the takeaway from Sarah Ruhl’s “Dear Elizabeth,” a look at the decades-long relationship between the 20th century poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell that proved the only true and lasting oasis within a pair of lives that suffered all of the usual ups and downs of human existence, with an extra dose of mutual tumult.
This is a play that draws almost entirely from their voluminous correspondence across 30 years of friendship (they actually met in person very rarely). It’s hardly the first dramatic work based on letters sent across many years and I’ve typically approached such epistolary works with some trepidation. They’re often static and, well, a little dull.
But at least in director Christina Casano’s quite beautiful little Remy Bumppo Theatre Company production, this one is never boring for a second.
That’s partly due to how well Ruhl has chosen the selections in the piece and even more a consequence of the quality of the deeply personal writing (more than 800 pages worth!) from the two real-life subjects, here writing only to each other.
But, on Belmont Avenue in Chicago where, remarkably, two Ruhl plays can be seen at once in different spaces at Theater Wit, it’s also a consequence of just how deep the actress Leah Karpel is willing to go without sacrificing her verbosity and bite.
Leah Karpel (as Elizabeth) is ably supported by Christopher Sheard (Robert) and is just so alive at every on-stage moment that you constantly believe anything could happen, even though you’re actually just listening to the feels of two aging poets and teachers, passions ever veiled and grumpiness ever close to the frontal lobe. At one point, in a lament familiar to anyone who has taught creative writing, Karpel’s Elizabeth declaims how sick she is of being forced to read poems by students about either their mothers and fathers or their sex lives. Yawn.
And yet Karpel’s acting makes it impossible to not want to listen to her for as long as she is up there talking. That’s not especially long; “Dear Elizabeth,” which was first seen at the Yale Repertory Theatre some 12 years ago, is just 90 minutes, although Remy Bumppo has added an intermission, which works nicely for a work that supports taking a breath.
There’s another aspect of this play that was less of a thing in 2012. People don’t write many letters these days, not on paper at least. You’re lucky to get a card once or twice a year. And thus you sit there marveling at this record of two magnificent practitioners of a rapidly declining art form, the strictly-for-one-not-your-spouse outpouring of intense feelings.
If all this sounds rather sentimental, even twee, know that the director Casano, with the help of a modest but lovely design from Catalina Niño and projections by John Boeshe, avoids too much of that. There’s an quotidian quality to these two American writers even as you are hearing words that are anything but ordinary.
Great writers, of course, have the same insecurities, regrets, failed relationships and brushes with mortality as everyone else. But it’s a rare show that makes that clear while also pointing out how vital such literary commentators are to the soul.
I can’t promise a whip-bang-shebang experience. But I can say that if you care some for poems and poets, writers and their worries, and love affairs that last a lifetime, you’ll be enthralled.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Dear Elizabeth” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Nov. 17
Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Tickets: $15-$55 at 773-975-8150 and www.remybumppo.org
