The phenomenal success of Love Letters by A.R. Gurney, a touching romance written with old-fashioned pen and paper which became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is one of the great triumphs of American theatre. According to the records, when Gurney first set out to create Love Letters, he initially intended to write a book. Optimistically, he sent the script to The New Yorker, who promptly returned it with the terse reply that they didn’t publish plays. Taking the magazine’s advice, Gurney decided to try rewriting it as a two-person play, where both actors read letters back and forth to one another. What the playwright now needed was a venue where he could try out his experiment. He hit upon a location by sheer chance.

Gurney was scheduled to give a speech at the New York Public Library — but instead, armed with his friend and collaborator, actress Holland Taylor and a pile of papers, the pair read Love Letters to the crowd. “We started at 4:00,” he said to a friend later, “and I put in an arbitrary intermission at 5:00, saying, ‘Well, I’m sure a lot of you have to go,’” Gurney recalled. “And nobody wanted to leave! So I figured we had something.” It was a humble beginning and after that the playwright never looked back.

Gurney had his admirers one of whom was John Tillinger, literary consultant for the Long Wharf Theatre who fell in love with the play and offered to direct the premiere at the New Haven, CT theatre company. In his conversation with others he said Love Letters was theatre down to its most simple level — the spoken word. He, however, laid down two rules. The two actors must not look at each other, and they must not memorise their lines but must read each epistle. This was something that was assiduously followed whenever and wherever the play was performed.

A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters made a humble beginning, after which the playwright never looked back

Love Letters has been a favourite selection for actors with busy schedules, for it doesn’t really require much preparation or extravagant scenery. Choreographers don’t have to spend sleepless nights worrying about whether or not they can find somebody who can match the curtains with the sofas and the carpets. Also, the fact that the performers didn’t have to memorise their lines made it easy for an actor who had a couple of days off from a location shooting to breeze in and out to read his lines.

The play centres on two well to do characters — Melissa Gardner, who apparently is the richer of the two and rubs it in, and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. They meet for the first time as children in the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the United States, and when there were tea trays and liveried chauffeurs dressed like Erich von Stroheim complete with boots and goggles standing next to a polished silver Packard convertible. The two sit side by side at tables on a bare stage, lamps burning a bright orange, and reminisce over half a century of correspondence.

The dialogue starts with birthday-party thank-you cards, and graduates to letters and notes which discuss hopes, dreams, longings, frustration, ecstasy, suspicion, taunts, triumphs and disappointments. Fifty years later, when the curtain is about to descend on this bittersweet memoir, it is already far too late for them to do anything but to reminisce about the wasted years.

The play premiered in New Haven, moved to New York City, toured Europe, was performed in Pakistan and ended up as a movie. As the director felt that audiences wouldn’t particularly care to see a film in which a couple babbled away at some romantic mush for 120 minutes, costumes and scenery were added and in the process it also eroded some of the magic of the meandering script.

What is interesting is the number of celebrities who have taken part in the play. Some of the female stars whose names readily come to mind are Kathleen Turner, Sigourney Weaver, Candice Bergen and the two English actresses Jean Simmons and Diana Rigg.

Last week Love Letters was staged in the open air at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi. The play was directed by the highly cultured and imaginative Hameed Haroon who has devoted much time and attention to preserving the museum which is an essential part of our history. I still remember the time when the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party leader L.K. Advani visited Mohatta Palace and was taken to the cul-de-sac where a lot of statues in chilly white reflected some of the people who shaped the Raj. I have often wondered what went through his mind at the time.

Rehana Saigol was Melissa and Imran Aslam was Andy, two epistolatory soul mates in this tragic and comic play in which audiences in the United States have been known to laugh themselves silly … or end up weeping. The first time I saw Saigol on the stage was in 1977 when she took the title role of Hedda Gabler in the play written by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. It has never been my favourite, being an unabashed Terence Rattigan fan. But the way Saigol handled the part, with warmth and sensitivity and occasional flashes of extempore brilliance, was quite riveting. I have always been struck by her mellifluous voice, her slow precise elocution and her air of wistfulness in the goodbyes

Later, in fact much later, in 1999 to be precise, she joined Imran Aslam and the two teamed up for the first time in Love Letters which they have repeated from time to time. Aslam has been something of a find. Under the restless spirit of the journalist, there has always lurked the eager thespian. His forte, however, is political satire, and this is something he is jolly good at. The way he delivers a political rebuke, with an abysmal seriousness, is marvellously involving.

In Love Letters, Saigol was effervescent. I loved the way she knocked back a full decanter of the distilled essence of grain which was obviously apple juice, gradually turning maudlin and shaping her subsequent dialogue.

I believe Andy has the more difficult part. There are occasional bouts in his narrative of what an American actor named Robert Culp playing a radio junkie once described as ‘dead air’. This is when an actor says nothing at all, evades a question or gives an answer which has nothing whatsoever to do with the original query. It is something in which Middle Eastern heads of state have become highly proficient especially when they are being interviewed by Christiane Amanpour who has the habit of being rather direct.

Haroon, Saigol and Aslam and all those who pitched in to entertain a Karachi audience need to be thanked for their devotion to keep theatre alive in a brittle and forsaken city. I look forward to their next production. Perhaps this time it will be Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables.

Those who appeared on the sidelines need a big pat on the back. Shakil Saigol for his design, Farishteh Aslam for ensuring the two performers didn’t fly off the handle metaphorically speaking, Arif Mahmood for his crisp photographs, Farrukh Mujahid for his management of the stage, and last but not least Farida Munavarjahan Said for producing a catalogue that will have a long, long shelf life.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 10th, 2016