Love Letters

"I feel most alive when I'm holed up in some corner, writing things down. I pick up a pen, and almost immediately everything seems to take shape around me. I love to write. I love writing my parents because then I become the ideal son. I love writing essays for English, because then I am for a short while a true scholar. I love writing letters to the newspaper, notes to friends, Christmas cards, anything where I have to put down words. I love writing you. You most of all. I always have. I feel like a true lover when I'm writing you. This letter, which I'm writing with my own hand, with my own pen, in my own penmanship, comes from me and no one else, and is a present of myself to you. It's not typewritten, though I've learned how to type. There's no copy of it, though I suppose I could use a carbon. And it's not a telephone call, which is dead as soon as it is over. No, this is just me, me the way I write, the way my writing is, the way I want to be to you, giving myself to you across a distance, not keeping or retaining any part of it for myself, giving this piece of myself to you totally, and you can tear me up and throw me out, or keep me, and read me today, tomorrow, any time you want until you die."
                                                                                           ~Andy, (read by Ryan O'Neal)

The above is among one of the Red Balloon's favorite quotes from last evening's opening night performance of Love Letters in Boston.

If you have the opportunity to see Love Letters in person, the performances by Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw are exceptional. The chemistry between the pair is unseen in between actors and actresses in most modern day films. The electricity between them leaps off the stage. Interestingly enough, the two never actually look at one another. Sitting side by side, reading letter after letter, the two speaks volumes without exchanging so much as a glance in the other's direction. What is so powerful is both the performances by the pair and the script, A.R. Gurney's everlasting romance, each line written so poetically. Experience the poetry for yourself, just in time for Valentine's Day!

Love Letters is playing at the Boston Shubert Theater through February 7th.