STAGE REVIEW : Special Delivery for Gurney’s ‘Love Letters’

Could one call an event at which two actors sit side by side at a large desk and read to the audience a play? No. At least, not usually.

That holds true for the first half of A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” which opened Tuesday at the Canon Theatre. It’s a pleasant, often humorous exchange of epistolary banter between two upper-crusty New England chums from the second grade to roughly the end of high school. Smart, sweet, elliptically funny stuff, but no cigar.

However, in the second half these WASP little-rich-kids grow up. And so does “Love Letters.” It becomes a play by at least one definition: as an emotional transaction between characters who affect each other (and us) as they grow and change.

The letters in the story trace the friendship, school, college and post-college careers, adventures, loves and losses of Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner. They span close to 60 years during which Andy, whose family is less cash-rich but better endowed emotionally than Melissa’s, grows into an affluent, dedicated, fundamentally decent U.S. senator with a wife and three kids.

Melissa, on the other hand, is a free spirit with a genius for impulsive wrong moves who rebels against her divorced parents, their spouses, the stifling boarding schools she’s forced to inhabit and Andy’s innate propensity for stuffiness. A talented artist, she marries the wrong stock analyst, has the wrong two daughters, and ends up majoring in alcoholism with a degree in self-destruction.

The skill of Gurney’s postal portraiture lies in defining character strictly through expressed thought--and in delineating how the bumpiness of the course which these two lives pursue repeatedly thwarts their early inclination to intersect. Every time one friend is prepared to meet the other halfway, the other is fatefully prevented from making the corresponding move. When one’s in New York, the other’s in Boston. When one is in Naples the other’s in Paris. When one is divorced the other is married. When one is on the ascendant, the other is sliding down.

Once, for a few joyful weeks, their lives converge. But it’s too much, too late. By then Melissa is too needy, too desperately dependent on Andy for her own good, and Andy too irreversibly trapped by his public image for his.

The subtext, sadly, also suggests that these two are by now entirely too different to make a go of it, even if life permitted. Their giddy, momentary collision has the effect of thrusting Melissa into final orbit.

To add spice to this deceptively simple formula of two actors reading from a script, Gurney has tossed another ingredient into the crucible: Andrew and Melissa are played by a different set of performers each week, guaranteeing that the volatile chemistry will be modified with each combination.

This has the dual virtue of creating a new experience for the audience every seven days and allowing “name” actors to invest a relatively brief amount of time in a stage experience that pays off hansomely in emotional dividends.

This week (through Sunday), it’s Treat Williams and Christine Lahti who take on the roles. While Lahti stumbled over some of the lesser lines of Act I Tuesday, she blossomed into a captivatingly wry, suicidal creature of tragic rather than soap operatic proportions in Act II, while Williams grew comfortably (and in the end movingly) into the nice-guy, suburban senator with feelings.

There is some similarity between this piece and Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey’s one-woman stage adaptation of her novel, “A Woman of Independent Means”--and it is not just the fact that Hailey’s book, too, was written in the form of letters (from one woman to the entire outside world).

It, too, charted a life through the mail it generated. But while Texas and New England are admittedly far apart in sensibility, big money, more significantly, is big money everywhere, and it breeds a unique species: people who inhabit the arguably best schools, best homes, best hotels, best clubs and best clothes as if by divine right rather than economic plenipotency.

Some of them can be colorful. Like Melissa. And Gurney knows it. This ambience was his own. He grew up in it and knows it like the back of his hand. And he is able to translate its shortcomings and transgressions into cogent, clever and even touching theatre. Act I may be lightweight stuff, but there is nothing undernourishing about what follows it.

How well the upcoming “couples” realize this piece will depend entirely on the juices they generate between them. They are Ned Beatty and Michael Learned (Tuesday through April 29), Meredith Baxter-Birney and Richard Thomas (May 1-6), Julie Hagerty and Christopher Reeve (May 8-13), Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt (May 15-20), Ed Begley Jr. and Swoosie Kurtz (May 22-27) and Carol Burnett and Leslie Nielsen (May 29-June 3).

Faites vos jeux.

At 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends June 3. $27.50-$30; (213) 859-2830).