Dear Elizabeth at Portland Stage

Portland Stage announces three performances of a staged reading of Dear Elizabeth
by Sarah Ruhl featuring a rotating cast of Portland Stage Affiliate Artists.

? Friday, January 12 Moira Driscoll* & Ron Botting*
? Saturday, January 13 Maureen Butler & Daniel Noel*
? Sunday, January 14 Callie Kimball & Dustin Tucker*
*Member of Actors Equity Association

Enjoy Sarah Ruhl’s captivating play, Dear Elizabeth, with a rotating cast of Portland Stage
Affiliate Artists. The Dark Week Project will present three staged readings of Ruhl’s play on
the Mainstage, while the theater is ‘dark,’ a technical term to signify that the theater is in a
transition week between regularly scheduled Mainstage Productions.
Dear Elizabeth is a moving and innovative play based on one of the greatest
correspondences in literary history. From 1947 to 1977, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
exchanged more than four hundred letters. Describing the writing of their poems, their travel
and daily illnesses, the pyrotechnics of their romantic relationships, and the profound
affection they had for each other. These missives are the most intimate record available of
both poets and one of the greatest correspondences in American literature.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl fell in love with these letters and set herself an unusual challenge: to
turn this thirty-year exchange into a stage play, and to bring to life the friendship of two
writers who were rarely even in the same country. As innovative as it is moving, Dear
Elizabeth gives voice to a conversation that lived mostly in writing, illuminating some of the
finest poems of the twentieth century and the minds that produced them.

Authors

• Sarah Ruhl