Love Letters at Theatre Workshop of Nantucket

Starring Lea Thompson and John Shea

Few plays capture the soft passing of years, the quiet aftermath of suppressed longing, and the enduring artifice of tradition quite like Gurney’s two-character masterpiece. On the surface, the piece follows two lifelong correspondents — Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III — as they exchange letters, postcards, and valentine notes over five decades. But for audiences who cherish nuance, good writing, and the world of “old- Nantucket-meets-old-New England” sensibility, Love Letters offers something richer: the ache of lives lived side-by-side but never quite touching, the subtle shifts of class and expectation, and the lingering power of what is left unsaid.

Staged simply two actors seated at desks, reading from the letters, the play invites us to lean in. We watch these two characters grow up, drift apart, find one another, and never quite reach one another. For this island audience, with our love of genteel humor, refined understatement, and the salt wind off the Sound, it will feel like an intimate house reading… with the weight of a lifetime inside. ‍

“One reason why Love Letters is so frequently produced … It’s one of Mr. Gurney’s best plays, a tender study of thwarted love…”-Broadway World ‍

“A table, two chairs and a pair of actors reading from scripts … but A.R. Gurney’s deceptively simple 1988 epistolary two-hander … is that rare work whose emotional richness requires no embellishment.”- The Hollywood Reporter