Stage Light

For all its emotional undulations and an often gentle expression of the struggles between a man and a woman in love, writer-director Tony Tanner’s “Notes” at the Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center stubbornly remains a device in search of a play.

On paper, Tanner’s concept is clever: Take “Love Letters” and its epistolary dialogue and transfer it to e-mails between lovers. But having grasped his device, Tanner doesn’t have the dramatic ideas to make his work substantial.

Cybergeeks will tell you, and they’re partly right, that e-mail has revived the once-lost art of letter writing. E-mail strips away the time-consuming irritants of getting the right stationary, finding stamps and trudging the letter to the mailbox. It lets us simply write.

Of course, handwriting a letter imposes a different kind of writing, more thoughtful, even more poetic, while e-mailing demands short bursts of words, fast and efficient. It’s more direct, and it loses a bit of soul.

Unfortunately, Tanner’s text often sounds as if he’s never written an e-mail in his life.

Long after ad account executive Chris Dooley (Lawrence H. Toffler) and hopeful fashion designer Susan Strong (Kate Connor) have fallen in love and married, they must contend with Chris’ domineering, ultra-Christian father. His numerous heart attacks and dementia require more and more of Chris’ time. The father and his religion eventually become a terrible wedge between Chris and Susan.

In the meantime, Susan, in a typical e-mail in this self-consciously literary play, writes to Chris that his father “must be someplace that you can contemplate with equanimity.” It is hard to know exactly what Susan means by this, and actor Connor’s flat delivery suggests a certain amount of rote reading of her lines.

But more crucially, nobody on the planet e-mails in such florid language. “Notes” abounds in such language, and it soon strains our belief in this couple as a living, breathing entity.

Unlike “Love Letters,” in which author A.R. Gurney was always careful to explain passages of time and allow us to see his couple actually spending time together between letter scribblings, Chris and Susan hardly ever seem to be together long enough to develop a shared passion.

Their time apart begins as a running joke, and then becomes a grim weight. Tanner wants to comment on how e-mailing deviously allows us to be physically apart while giving us the illusion of feeling close, but the idea doesn’t translate dramatically on stage.

In a work utterly dependent on the two actors at all times, Connor’s lack of emotional spirit dampens the dramatics, while Toffler lends large, gratifying doses of vulnerability and broiling internal conflict to his Chris.

His sheer willpower as an actor almost makes Chris’ final transformation a surprising shock. But after elegant blocking (Tanner creates minimalist pas de deux movement for the couple) and Evan A. Bartoletti’s subdued lights and suggestive set design, even this finale feels like an inelegant mistake.

“Notes,” Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, 11006 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends April 25. $15. (818) 761-0704. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.