ISLAMABAD: On Monday and Tuesday evenings, residents of the city were taken back in time to an age where telephones were a ‘modern’ invention and traditional communication meant letters.
Page upon page were filled with the help of “Parker” pens and the craft of letter writing taught in English Composition classes.
This nostalgia filled trip, for those old enough to have been born before cell phones and text messages became ubiquitous, was a production of Love Letters by AR Gurney.
Directed by Hameed Haroon, the production was brought to Islamabad by the Mutual Admiration Society, the Dawn Media Group and the Serena Group of Hotels Islamabad.
The proceeds of the two days will be donated to the Chitral Rehabilitation Project of Dawn Relief.
The well-known play which has been staged multiple times in the US and in South Asia revolves around two characters, Melissa (played by Rehana Saigol) and Andy (played by Imran Aslam), who sit side by side and read letters and notes written to each other over 50 years as they lead separate lives, coming together for a brief affair, shortly before the end of the play.
Amid writing invitations, apologies and letters to their parents from boarding school and summer camps, Melissa and Andy, privileged members of America’s East Coast society, write to each other, sharing their school woes, family stories and hopes and aspirations; later, love troubles and career choices — mostly in the case of Andy — and marriages become dominant themes.
Gurney’s is a strong script in which letters don’t just etch out the two characters and their strong relationship which ranges from flirtation to companionship to love but also paints a picture of stifling society which is particularly harsh on its women.
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Indeed, for a two-person play, it’s intriguing that by the end, the viewers are left with a far richer portrait of Melissa — from her troubled childhood with a much married, alcoholic mother to her own descent into alcoholism, a divorce and estrangement from her daughters.
There are references to her efforts to paint and hold exhibitions of her work but fleeting ones while Andy’s career moves forward solidly — from a few years in the Navy to a legal career which then smoothly leads to a successful political career. “Stuffy” and “self important” but “successful” nonetheless.
The underlying sense is that Melissa would have been a more stable, happier person if she had someone who loved her, a parent and/or a partner. Whether this would have led to a more successful career is deemed irrelevant, it seems.
It’s hard to say if the focus on a woman’s personal well being and its dependency on a satisfactory love life is a social comment or a case of the playwright accepting certain social myths as fact. In either case, it creates a character and a time quite relevant to present day Pakistan which resonated with the audience despite the American language and cultural references.
However, it’s just not the social commentary that makes Love Letters a suitable production, locally.
Its epistolary form makes a virtue of the absence of stage facilities prevalent in Pakistan, allowing the play to be staged even in a large hall in a hotel.
Acoustics and lights are hard to manage in such makeshift places but it goes to the credit of the director and his two performers that the audience was kept engaged throughout.
This is especially commendable as there is little physical activity on the stage with Saigol and Aslam sitting on their respective desks for both the acts.
Admittedly, the first half seemed a tad long (in comparison the second half is crisper) but it’s hard to shake off the feeling that in the age of Twitter, where we binge watch television serials because a two-hour long film appears too lengthy, we have lost the ability to focus (most theatre productions tend to be three hours on average). And really who has the time to read or hear letters when we can just FaceTime? But if one can still remember this now lost craft, Gurney’s play is a must-see as it is, above all, an ode to letter writing.
Published in Dawn, March 8th, 2017