Brian Dennehy & Mia Farrow to Reprise LOVE LETTERS Roles at Long Wharf Theatre

Theatrical legends Brian Dennehy and Mia Farrow return to Long Wharf Theatre in A.R. Gurney's poignant and enduring play Love Letters.

This special event will run from March 29 through April 10, 2016 on the Claire Tow Stage in the C. Newton Schenck III Theatre, 222 Sargent Drive. The show will open to the press on Wednesday, March 30 at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $25-$85. The collaborating sponsor is Webster Bank.

From valentines and thank-you notes exchanged as children, Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner become lifelong confidantes. Through sharing fifty years of joys and disappointments large and small, they forge an intimacy that transcends distance and time. As circumstances pull them apart, their letters-often hilarious and always eloquent- bring them back together. "It's one of Mr. Gurney's best plays, a tender study of thwarted love: Melissa is a scatty upper-class rebel, Andy is a stuffy upper- middle-class striver, and as they read a lifetime's worth of letters out loud, you come to know them so well that their parallel sorrows seem as familiar as your own," said The Wall Street Journal.

Gurney had initially written Love Letters as a story and sent it to the New Yorker for possible publication. The New Yorker sent it back, telling Gurney that they don't publish plays. His agent then suggested the piece might work on stage. The playwright was speaking at the New York Public Library, so he decided to bring his story along with him and introduce it as a play. Reading it alongside actress Holland Taylor, he realized that the piece worked in front of an audience. Readjusting his priorities for the story, Gurney then gave the play to Long Wharf Theatre, where it premiered with a rotating cast in 1988. Love Letters, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has gone on to be performed on Broadway and all over the world. "Love Letters is about a fifty year love affair carried on primarily through letters, written in and about a world where letter-writing was very much an essential mode of communication, especially between men and women," Gurney said.

Dennehy has most recently appeared at Long Wharf Theatre in Krapp's Last Tape and Hughie. Mia Farrow made her first appearance at Long Wharf in Fran's Bed during the 2003-04 season.

For more information about the show, or to purchase tickets, visit www.longwharf.org or call 203-787-

4282.

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