STAGE : Keep Those ‘Letters’ Coming : A.R. Gurney’s ‘sort of a play’ about two friends features a different cast every outing

Playwright A.R. Gurney wasn’t so sure his new play, “Love Letters,” had much of a future. He sent it to the New Yorker, and the New Yorker sent it right back. He didn’t even think it was stageworthy.

Never mind that Gurney is the man who wrote both “The Dining Room” and “The Cocktail Hour,” two hit plays chronicling the world of well-educated, well-off white Anglo Saxon Protestants. When the New York Public Library booked him to speak, and he didn’t much like their topic, he decided to test his unconventional manuscript on the library audience.

Gurney and actress friend Holland Taylor read the first half of the play that evening, then wanted to stop because the audience only expected a 40-minute speech. “But they all stayed and wanted to see the rest,” recalls the New York-based playwright. “People came up to me afterwards, and I could tell by the enthusiasm and the applause--I knew we had something.”

He sure did. After stops both off and on Broadway last year, “Love Letters” has already gone on to play in more than 25 U.S. cities and a dozen foreign countries. It is about to start its 40th week at the 382-seat Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills--where it recouped its initial investment after 10 weeks--and just a few weeks ago, Columbia Pictures announced a future film version.

Gurney’s theatrical Comstock Lode consists of a lifetime of correspondence between Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner, two fictitious upper-class WASPs. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, the letters take the two friends and sometime lovers from second grade through middle-age.

This is dramatic stuff: lawyer Ladd’s glide ever-upward through Yale and Harvard Law School into the U.S. Senate parallels artist Gardner’s slide downward through bad marriages and alcoholism. Reviews have been both positive and numerous, and Time magazine called “Love Letters” “one of the four or five best American plays of the ‘80s.”

All of the action is read rather than acted out, and staging is Spartan. Onstage are two nicely dressed actors who face the audience rather than one another. They sit side by side behind a mahogany desk which itself sits on an Oriental rug. A decanter of water and a glass are in front of each performer.

So much for sets, costumes and props. His “sort of a play,” Gurney says, is very easy to do, one of three reasons he offers for its vast appeal. Reason two, he says, is that “the characters and conflict are very clear, and three, it’s a good story, a good love story in the star-crossed lovers tradition.”

New York Times critic Mel Gussow called the play “a work of modest intentions and modest achievement,” but both he and other critics pointed to the substantial demands the show makes on its actors.

Its simplicity is deceptive, cautions Meredith Baxter-Birney, who has appeared in the show with four different partners. “People say ‘I saw you read “Love Letters,” ’ but it is by far one of the most demanding roles I have ever done in terms of the intense concentration,” says the actress, adding that her last performance even left her with a headache for a few days. “With other roles, there’s more physical action--you have props, blocking, eye contact, maybe physical contact with other actors. Here I work off the words, and the rest I create on my own.”

At the Canon, as at most other places the show has played, the cast generally changes on a weekly basis. More than 150 actors have appeared in Gurney’s epistolary drama since it opened in February, 1989, at New York’s Promenade Theatre with John Rubinstein and Kathleen Turner.

Actress Swoosie Kurtz has described the roster as “musical celebrities,” and the Los Angeles production alone has included such performers as Kurtz with Ed Begley Jr. and Charlton Heston with Jean Simmons. Such younger on-stage pairings as Andrew McCarthy with Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick with Helen Hunt have been among the show’s best-sellers locally.

“The ever-changing actor is certainly a part of the play’s success,” says Richard Frankel, one of the show’s co-producers in New York and elsewhere. “People come to see their favorite actors do the play . . . (but) if the play weren’t so good, the rotating of the actors wouldn’t help. The arc of the play is so grand, it’s almost an epic, and people become very engaged. There’s so much for actors to deal with in this play.”

Ask Gena Rowlands, currently onstage with Ben Gazzara in the show for the third

time. “I think in a lot of people’s lives, there is someone they feel they missed, for some reason, whatever it was,” says Rowlands, who first appeared in “Love Letters” with Cliff Robertson on a cruise ship to Egypt. “The audience can empathize with that, and the idea of a (long) friendship, even if they aren’t people who went to boarding schools or are members of a superwealthy class. Who does it not appeal to?”

Gurney’s play “The Cocktail Hour” was at off-Broadway’s Promenade Theatre when the playwright told his producers about his newest show. “Love Letters” was then receiving favorable attention during a short run at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, and Frankel and colleagues agreed to present it on Monday nights when the Promenade was otherwise dark.

Starting with Rubinstein and Turner, different couples took turns as Andy and Melissa during the “Cocktail Hour” run. And when “The Cocktail Hour” moved on, Rubinstein and Stockard Channing kicked off a regular performance schedule at the Promenade. After 7 months off-Broadway, “Love Letters” moved to Broadway’s 500-seat Edison Theatre where it played three months before hitting the road.

Veteran Los Angeles producer Susan Dietz, who was artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse until a few months ago, hadn’t yet seen the show when Frankel called her to ask about a local production. But she’d heard good things about it, so she read the script, then went to New York to see the play onstage. Impressed with what she saw, she booked “Love Letters” last February for 8 weeks at the Playhouse’s 121-seat Balcony Theatre.

Joan Stein, who had produced Gurney’s “The Middle Ages” for both stage and TV, joined Dietz, and the two women put together the money to move the show to the Canon last April. The show was capitalized at $200,000, Dietz says, but they spent only about $140,000. Their 15 or 20 individual investors have thus far gotten a 150% return on their money, Dietz says, and by the show’s one year anniversary in April, she expects them to have doubled their investments.

They originally booked the Canon for less than 2 months, Stein says, “but after we put the tickets on sale, it was clear the response was overwhelming. We immediately knew we had a hit on our hands and could extend indefinitely.”

Dietz, Stein and company manage their hit from a crowded production office over the theater. That’s where casting director Steven Fertig is plunked at a worn, orange suede couch, a phone in one hand and a pencil poised over a legal pad in the other. Fertig’s job is to coordinate, with his producers, the continually changing cast roster.

Fertig likes to have the show booked six weeks in advance, although it doesn’t always work out that way. A few weeks ago, for instance, “Twin Peaks” stars Lara Flynn Boyle and Kyle MacLachlan exercised the “out” clause in their contracts because of other commitments, and the casting executive had to do a quick turn-around. Producers booked Melissa Gilbert-Brinkman and Scott Valentine, who they say are about the same age as Boyle and MacLachlan, delivering up veterans of “Little House on the Prairie” and “Family Ties” rather than the David Lynch series.

Not that theatergoers are particularly pleased when the stars change. A few members of the very young, very trendy crowd that had gathered for Special Agent Cooper, for instance, walked out soon after Gilbert-Brinkman and Valentine began, and one woman remarked at intermission that she was “bummed out” by the switch. Greg Gardner, 26, a Loyola Law School student, and his friend, jewelry saleswoman Carmen Whitmer, 21, got their tickets weeks previously, and said they probably wouldn’t have come if they’d known about the cast change before they got there.

(Tickets are sold with the caution that casts are subject to change, but producer Stein indicates they try to be accommodating. Purchasers are told there are no exchanges or refunds, she says, “although if someone has his or her heart set on seeing one particular actor, we try to accommodate them.”)

Producers have a tremendous talent pool to draw from here, of course. Heston, for instance, says he usually does a play every other year and Beverly Hills is a great deal more convenient than Beijing, where he last appeared onstage. Not only does he get to play the widest age range he could think of, Heston says, but he can also “sleep in my own bed. It’s even more desirable than the Ahmanson, which is 23 minutes’ drive--this theater is about 11 minutes away.”

Pay for everybody is $1500 a week, not much compared to what TV and film stars can command on screen. “You can slip in and out of (the show),” Baxter-Birney says. “One of the hard things about doing theater is you can’t make a living on the stage. I have 4,000 children. (Five, actually.) That’s a lot of Barbie dolls.”

No actor has ever been asked to read for the part, although Fertig says some have offered. Two actresses--Carey Lowell and Victoria Principal--made their stage debuts in the show, but he believes all the others have had stage experience. And Gurney has final veto power.

Gurney’s only written requirement for the play was that his actors be “roughly the same age”--so that their correspondence makes sense--and casting has been wide open. There have been young and old couples as well as black couples. (In shows starring Diahann Carroll with Paul Winfield and Alfre Woodard with Blair Underwood, director Ted Weiant has said that Gurney changed one phrase about “dark-skinned woman” to “exotic woman” while “blond goddesses” became “buxom goddesses”; two “uptight old WASPs” became “two uptight old farts.”)

Baxter-Birney last performed the role of Melissa with Michael Gross, her husband on the long-running TV series, “Family Ties,” and many performers in the show appear with somebody they’ve known--or even been married to--for a while. A few actors have met for the first time at rehearsal, but more likely they are at least acquaintances.

So we find not just TV couples like Baxter-Birney and Gross, but real-life couples like Broderick and Hunt, Boyle and MacLachlan or husband-and-wife teams such as Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker. It isn’t really necessary, Stein says, but she concedes there is “an intimacy about the piece which is sometimes served by a prior friendship.”

“It’s astonishing to think that Jason Robards can play the same part as Matthew Broderick,” Frankel says. “Obviously with Jason you see the experience of years and with Matthew, you see the enthusiasm of youth. Each brings a very different emphasis to the role.”

Each brings a different audience too. Actors such as Judd Nelson or Molly Ringwald clearly draw a younger crowd, Fertig concedes, “but that’s not to say that Charlton Heston and Jean Simmons brought in just older audiences. There are all kinds of young film buffs who want to see Moses, and Jean Simmons is a legend in herself.”

TV stars, Stein says, “certainly have a following and people are really interested in coming to see them in person. Audiences feel as if they know them from being with them week after week on television. But there are also people the audience rarely gets the chance to see on stage, like Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands, and the box office goes through the roof.”

A review of dollar grosses, as reported in weekly Variety, indicates Ringwald and McCarthy in third place, Broderick and Hunt in fourth, Carol Burnett and Leslie Nielsen in fifth, and Lee Remick (replaced by Sally Kirkland for two performances) and Tom Skerritt in sixth place.

First and second place both belong to Rowlands and Gazzara. “She’s just perfect,” Dietz says. “This is not to take away from any of the other wonderful actors, but Gena Rowlands is that woman-- she can just play her so well. And she and Ben have such a history, it’s magical onstage.”

It’s less magical other times, and dollar grosses can drop from a top of about $87,000 to $55,000 some weeks. While these weeks are often starring less familiar young actors or too familiar older actors, producers here and elsewhere say box office depends on more than casting.

At San Francisco’s Theatre on the Square, for instance, where the show closes on New Year’s Eve after 42 weeks, theater owner and producer Jonathan Reinis says that box office swings are “definitely a reflection of the popularity of the actor. But the time of year can also influence it, and, to a smaller extent, so do the other shows playing in town.”

What producers bank on is repeat visits. Rowlands, in fact, saw “Love Letters” three times, with three different casts, before she was approached to take it on herself. And each time she saw it, she says, “I saw a brand new play. It was mind-boggling. That’s what got me intrigued.”

The show has fared particularly well in Los Angeles. Grosses here during the holidays, which Frankel says are among the worst weeks of the year, have been within a few thousand dollars of other cities with far larger theaters. A recent last minute booking of the show in Washington fared poorly its last few weeks, while San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre ended its run of the show earlier this month after 6 weeks rather than the possible 10 weeks its theater was available.

While the play just closed after a brief run in London, Gurney says “the English are the only ones who haven’t liked it. Right now, as we speak, it’s playing in two cities in Australia and two cities in China in pirated editions. (The Chinese, he says, didn’t get permission and don’t pay royalties.) It’s in Leningrad, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Denmark, Norway. It’s in Buenos Aires and is supposed to open soon in Israel, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa.”

Back in the U.S., “Hart to Hart” stars Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner start a 5-city, 5-week tour next month in Seattle, which company manager Alan Markinson says will be followed by “yet unnamed” stars who will take the show to more cities. A second national company opens in Tallahassee, Fla., the same week with Betsy Palmer and Robert Reed.

But the changes still come weekly at the Canon. Currently being advertised for the week starting Jan. 8 are Corbin Bernsen and Sharon Stone, with Heston scheduled to return on Jan. 15, this time with Alexis Smith. Pam Dawber and Mark Harmon have been announced for the week starting Jan. 29.

“Most of these actors either started on the stage or have been on the stage and don’t have the windows in their schedules to devote a lot of time to theater,” says producer Stein. “This gives them an opportunity to come back to theater for a brief time, sharpen their theater skills and remember what a live audience sounds like.”