Synopses & Reviews
A moving, innovative play based on one of the greatest correspondences in literary historyFrom 1947 to 1977, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged more than four hundred letters. Cataloging the composition of their poems, their travel and daily routines, the pyrotechnics of their romantic relationships, and the profound affection they had for each other, these letters are the most intimate record of both poets and one of the greatest correspondences in American letters.
Sarah Ruhl is one of the most lauded and produced playwrights working today, with plays beloved for their unembarrassed lyricism, casual surrealism, and naked emotional force. In Dear Elizabeth, Ruhl attempts the impossible: adapting Lowell and Bishops thirty-year correspondence into a stage play. And she succeeds brilliantly, re-embodying the letters and poems in human voices, elegantly suggesting the poets lives outside of the letters, and poignantly depicting the emotional closeness and geographical distance that defined their thirty-year relationship. Dear Elizabeth offers a reading experience as engaging as a live performance, one that will entrance anyone curious about the lives of these legendary poets.
Review
“Ruhls gentle treatment of the poems, the way she finds the breathing space between life and art, cant be overpraised. She crystallizes the magic of what is left unsaid and the piercing intimacy of regret in one beguiling passage after another.” —Karen DSouza, San Jose Mercury News
Review
Praise for Dear Elizabeth
“Ruhls gentle treatment of the poems, the way she finds the breathing space between life and art, cant be overpraised. She crystallizes the magic of what is left unsaid and the piercing intimacy of regret in one beguiling passage after another.” —Karen DSouza, San Jose Mercury News
“Ruhl delicately explores, through nothing more than the letters and her own theatrical imagination, the solitude of the artist, the exactitude of the writers craft, the balance between confession and privacy and, in the end, why poetry matters.” —Frank Rizzo, Variety
“Dear Elizabeth mesmerizes in every way. An articulate, imaginative, and moving theatrical experience. . . . uniquely its own engaging creation. In an age of mutilated language and truncated texts, such a play commands every ounce of our attention.” —E. Kyle Minor, New Haven Register
“Watching poets, even eminent poets, read and write to each other shouldnt be half as gripping as playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Les Waters make it in Dear Elizabeth.” —Robert Hurwitt, SFGate
“Playwright Sarah Ruhl and her director and frequent collaborator Les Waters have re-set the rules and raised the bar for epistolary theatre in their bracing, moving and theatrically exciting production.” —Andrew Beck, Hartford Examiner
“Riveting. A moving, funny, and highly theatrical experience.” —Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post
Synopsis
From playwright Sarah Ruhl, Dear Elizabeth is a moving, innovative play based on one of the greatest correspondences in literary history--the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.
From 1947 to 1977, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop 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.
The 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.
About the Author
Sarah Ruhls plays include In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee), The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play, a Cycle (PEN American Award); Dead Mans Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); and most recently, Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Center Award for a midcareer playwright, the Feminist Presss Forty Under Forty Award, and the 2010 Lilly Award. She is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.