Letter writing is a dying art. In this social-media age—when a message can be sent instantaneously without pesky delay—patience, frustration, and the waiting game lose much of their real-life potency. When, on Messenger, you can write 100 words in 100 seconds without mulling it over (or, on Snapchat, a pic a sec), something gets lost in the act of text-based communication: the slow-crawl lurch of a moving hand, the heaviness of the hand as it picks up speed, the breathless recalling of the other person’s face and voice. It’s a seemingly minor thing, but a crucially human one.

It’s this humble beauty of the act of letter-writing that an astonishing event staged at Bing Concert Hall last Thursday nailed. Actors Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks gave a private reading of A.R. Gurney’s 1988 play Love Letters, which, if you were one of the lucky few students to enter the lottery and snag a ticket, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You come, of course, for the neon star-wattage (Hanks! Wilson! On stage! Together! Like the Lunts!). You stay, however, for something much more disturbing and deeply moving. For 90 minutes, post-election woe was transformed into a celebration of love’s struggle and, in its material death, spiritual victory.

The play is unusual for several reasons. On the surface, it’s just two people reading a script for an hour and a half. The “set” consists of two chairs and a black table with a flowing black table-top on top of an Ottoman rug. On the table are two copies of the Love Letters script. Wilson and Hanks quietly walk/fade in, plop down in their chairs, and begin reading a chunk of correspondence—Valentine’s Day cards from Kindergarten, Christmas greetings, scribbled notes, letters from the army, and the titular love letters—that their characters, Melissa and Andy, have amassed other a period of nearly half a century. From the awkward early days of 2nd grade crushin’, to the text-message-like notes planning to meet at such and such a place, from teenaged jealousies to extramarital affairs, and family deaths in between—Hanks and Wilson cover a lot of ground, romantically and temporally. The piece emphasizes staginess, stillness, casualness; the two sit straight up, never looking into each other’s eyes. And yet, the concert hall was filled with a supercharged intensity, constantly action-packed drama which resonated with every person who bore witness to that event.

It’s Wilson and Hanks who sell the emotional authenticity of Gurney’s WASP-obsessed, suddenly-politics-heavy play. Wilson offers a Melissa who is pragmatic, realistic, grounded, yet willing to stretch her patience with Andy and only Andy. She is a check and balance for him. When his flowery, Byron-copped tangents get unruly, she’s the first one to call him out on it. After gushing on rather sentimentally on “the dying art of the love letter,” she responds with pithy brutality: “Ya sound too much like your father.” Later, when she’s complaining that the two can never properly plan to see each other in person, she ruefully recalls, “Now I’ll have to write letters to you, which I hate.” Wilson does this really hip balancing act of keeping a level head and consenting to being taken for a romantic ride. It’s not hypocritical of her to say that she hates writing letters. But she really makes you understand why we write letters, why we write essays, texts, notes, reviews, why we write at all. Writing’s a beautiful way of connecting with an identity-on-paper who may never live up to being the person they are in the flesh. Somehow, captured on a page, a person’s constructed identity is that much more perfect.

Hanks swoons and oozes grace without needing to lift a finger. Here, the Hanks stillness we saw in Clint Eastwood’s Sully has been rechanneled, but in a theatrical realm. His Andy (the Andy of Toy Story grown up?) is working within his always-dependable sweetness to sketch out the life a hopeless sap who gets that sense of breathless Western romanticism from his dad. Even when this WASP climbs his way to the privileged top by becoming a lawyer and a Republican senator, Hanks never lets Andy’s nerve-wracked humanity be forgotten. Hanks, ever the surprising actor, can wring wry pithiness out of sarcastic one-liners and anti-Melissa rants. His booming, usually friendly voice turns believably angry when he passive-aggressively writes his 10-year-old friend: “Dear Melissa—remember me? Andy Ladd.” He shows real terror in his loneliness. The way Hanks’ voice is so deadly matter-of-fact as it plainly states a fact: “I like writing letters. I like writing you.” Hence, I write letters because you’re in my life, because you exist.

Hanks shows more restraint in the play’s opening scenes than Wilson (who animates her voice and hands with sing-songy wispiness). But as the two get older and the letters get less idealistic and cute, Andy can’t seem to control himself. He starts to lash out, becoming just as animated as Melissa in her younger days, but with a decidedly cynical, acerbic, and political nastiness.

Maybe Hanks’ best acting moment comes when Andy has been spurned by Melissa at a dance (She’s his date that night, but she leaves him during the Viennese waltz to neck with another guy.). Here, Hanks’ voice breaks and he seemingly takes no breaths as he writes, with punchy fury, “I’m really goddam mad at you.” (Is he ever.) In shorthand, this is popularly called being in the friendzone, but for me, that term is too cutesy and cloying and simple and harmless. The phenomenon Andy (and each of us, at some point in our lives) goes through should be made to sound far more complex and tumultuous. It’s more about the tragic, mini-missed opportunities in life, and how they’re tied to life’s soaring pleasures. It’s about trying to understand a special connection that can have no name put on it—friend? lover? boy/girlfriend? unrequited other? partner? None will do. It’s more about a clear path mossed over because of brutally fatalistic circumstance. It’s recognizing one’s faraway mortality when these mini-moments of spurned romantic interest occur—a montage of emotions that don’t link with one another. A memory’s being formed, but not the ones we will remember. The hinge between a gnawing hopelessness and a happy-go-lucky c’est-la-vie exists in two places: in Hanks’ breaking and actorly voice, and in your own private world, where you have your own bruised, battered, yet solid connection with that special someone who makes you feel all kinds of sweet somethings.

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Though it may not reach Cassavetes or Love Streams levels of unruly emotionality, Love Letters is a glorious mess of a squirrely story because of how it depicts letter-writing—and nearly all forms of text-based communication—as a coming together and a cleaving apart of people. It separates as much as it unites. An invisible wall keeps Melissa and Andy out of each other’s lives. The wall disables any peeking beyond it to truly engage with the other person’s weirdness. Melissa and Andy have come to prefer to love each other from a letter’s distance than a person’s closeness. They aren’t focused on talking with the “real” Andy or Melissa , they’re focused on creating a perfect ideal in their heads, an ideal that buries any faults, flaws, or failures in the other person. Their love frustrates because it never extends beyond the written word. When it does, it shrinks and shrivels.

At some point, Love Letters becomes a story about existence being pulled back-and-forth between ephemerality and permanence. Something that doesn’t seem to last is listening endlessly to the romantic cadence in a love’s lilting, faraway voice. You hear them even when they’re not physically there. Their spirit fills the actions of everything you do, follows you around. So that it doesn’t remained in a fixed position for long, Love Letters wants to maintain permanence when we, as a society, lean towards flux and fastness. Especially today, it seems like we’re always forgetting the things we create and second from the second they’re shot into the Internet ether. I think that’s why I can empathize so much with Hanks’ Andy, a man who tries to bitterly recover a “dying art.” It is, in many ways, a fools’ act; but perhaps none is finer and nobler.

This small human-scale scan of a man and a woman’s love is juxtaposed with Love Letters’ overwhelming cynicism about the human condition in “civilized” society. Melissa and Andy get to a point where they can’t communicate through letters because his political constituents, some college interns, and the wife and kids will suspect. Citing a running joke throughout the play, the telephone (preferred by Melissa) beats the letter (preferred by Andy) at last—with a cynical, jaded, extramarital, political edge. Senator Andy Ladd talks to Melissa as a used thing, a muse, not as a partner anymore—a sad reality. He emphasizes the election, prioritizing politics. She emphasizes the future, prioritizing human closeness. How to navigate this volatile minefield? Neither I nor anyone else in this post-election moment really has a solid answer. But Melissa’s definitely on the right track, realizing (more than Andy at this point) that politics cannot function without considering the vital, complex, human side to it. Lives are at stake in America today, and without that crucial sense of human empathy, we’re left with the gnawing nothingness Andy feels when he finds out Melissa is gone.

There’s an aching tragedy in the play’s final parts. Tragedy of the soul. Tragedy of a jaded social era (now that the play’s over, we’re back to the “real” world…). Tragedy that Hanks and Wilson bring vividly to life. Melissa’s last correspondence to Andy: She never wants to see him again. She’s grown fat, dependent on booze and pills, her fledgling career as an artist put indefinitely on hold. Her letter to him is insistently “no.” In the next letter, Andy writes to the mother of Melissa: “Dear Mrs. Gardener: I think the first letter I ever wrote was to you, accepting an invitation for Melissa’s birthday party. Now I’m writing to you about her death.”

We’ve come full circle, time-wise. Love Letters plays with, stretches, and contorts time to its will. 90 minutes—a rather short time for plays and movies—spans 50 some-odd years. Time has no sympathies for individuals. Rather, history and politics swallow the individual, which we see all the time. We see it in Goya’s painting The Third Day of May 1808. We see it in Robert Altman’s film Nashville (1975). We see it in the recent ascension of a fascist, whose meteoric rise was the culmination of decades and centuries of anti-Establishment resentment and hate-filled rhetoric in America, and the voices of individuals being silenced all around. We see it in the last letter Leonard Cohen (whose death was announced a mere hour before the performance) wrote to his lifelong love Marianne Ihlen, his muse-partner-lover-friend-amor since the 1960s. (She’s the subject of “So Long Marianne,” one of the songs off Cohen’s era-defining, soul-shattering debut Songs of Leonard Cohen [1967].) Knowing Marianne was dying, Leonard wrote her a letter in July, a letter that could just as easily have been slipped into Love Letters’ breathless correspondence:

“Well, Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

We also see it, perhaps most cogently, in James Joyce’s short story The Dead, which I couldn’t stop thinking about as Wilson finally breaks the stone-wall, post-death, and whispers “Thank you, Andy,” in his tearful final letter.

Yes, The Dead—the powerful story, and the just-as-powerful 1987 film from the legendary American director John Huston, his last before his death. Like Love Letters, Joyce’s and Huston’s Dead delights in here-today-gone-tomorrow moments. An Irish mother remembers when she went fishing with her son-in-law in Scotland, and how the hotel manager helped them fry the caught fish. An older Irish spinster recalls hearing a sweet, mellow tenor named Parkinson; nobody remembers him, much less heard his voice, except this final member of a dying generation. They are culturally specific and are a radical, political call for empathy, understanding, humanity, universality. The final scene of The Dead, where a woman cries as she tells her husband of her youthful love for a boy who died young, shocks you out of your seat. Like the final scene of Love Letters, it makes you cry, and it emphasizes human love over the barriers (social, political, economic) that keep us torn apart.

Joyce and Huston, like Gurney-Hanks-Wilson in Love Letters, collapse time, making us aware of our own precariousness, our own vulnerability to that rascally demon called love. Thus, it restores the sanctity of our mortality and our morality. We’ve too much going for us now to stop, they seem to say. Love—not simply romantic, but human—keeps the race going. We must always roll on and fight for the small and the big in life, for what is life if not a mad dash to seize the active moment and triumphantly delay the inevitable equalizing force of the snow, the fade-out?

Images courtesy of Steve Castillo

Carlos Valladares ('18, Film Studies) is a native Angelino who loves movies, music, and life. He thinks "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", "City Lights", "A Woman Under the Influence", "A Hard Day's Night" and "Play Time" contain the secrets to life. He enjoys writing film criticism and getting into all sorts of sitcom shenaniganry with his friends. You can catch him wearing a cabbie hat, listening to "Pet Sounds" or "Tapestry" on the way to class.