Showing the arc of romance through series of love letters
Think of Bill Corbett and Kira Obolensky's Hate Mail, currently at Act II Playhouse, as a slacker version of Love Letters. It certainly has indie cred: Corbett was a writer - and even cooler, the voice of Crow T. Robot - on the cult classic cable show Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Think of Bill Corbett and Kira Obolensky's
Hate Mail
, currently at Act II Playhouse, as a slacker version of
Love Letters.
It certainly has indie cred: Corbett was a writer - and even cooler, the voice of Crow T. Robot - on the cult classic cable show
Mystery Science Theater 3000
.
Borrowing A.R. Gurney's epistolary conceit, the script pairs a man and woman, in this case, Preston, a neurotic rich kid, and Dahlia, his artsy, pretentious female nemesis, whose correspondence chronicles the growth of their relationship.
The work has a do-it-yourself feeling about it, kind of like a well-blogged road trip, and it becomes obvious pretty quickly that idealized romance, as read onstage in
Love Letters
by the likes of Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers, isn't part of the journey.
Unlike Gurney's sentimental play, Preston's and Dahlia's correspondence continues until the relationship is wrung dry and missives begin arriving with dead animals packaged inside.
However,
Hate Mail
is no cynical treatise on the lameness of love. It runs parallel, not perpendicular, to
Love Letters
, inhabiting its own era, but acknowledging the timelessness of missed cues and connections.
Hate Mail
espouses a kind of romantic realism, examining the failed couplings that leave us wondering what went wrong when, for a while, everything felt so right.
Real-life married couple Damon Bonetti (Preston) and Charlotte Northeast (Dahlia) work seamlessly with director David Stradley, bringing to life the cringe-worthy confusion, humor and frustration of early adulthood courtship. The actors roll with their characters' whims - from a cultish ashram in Montana to a vitamin-selling escapade in Miami - and grow their identities before our eyes. Even when the script gets outlandish, Bonetti and Northeast take it in stride, and bring us along with them for the joyride.
Scenic designer Melissa Guyer also gets the piece's lo-fi aesthetic, and has created a set to match, with clever hidden panels that open to reveal a Times Square trinket shop or the brick walls of a condo loft.
Paired with a Lou Reed soundtrack, this production remains free of nostalgia, but loaded with down-to-earth affection; those days of uncertainty and relative freedom were a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. Thanks to Act II, Stradley and his talented actors, the visit is a lot more fun the second time around.
Hate Mail
Written by Bill Corbett and Kira Obolensky, directed by David Stradley, scenery by Melissa Guyer, costumes by Jessica Risser-Milne, sound by (Matthew Aaron, lighting by James Leitner. Presented by Act II Playhouse.
The cast:
Damon Bonetti, Charlotte Northeast.
Playing at
Act II Playhouse,
56 E. Butler Ave., Ambler, through Dec. 9. Tickets: $30-$40.
Information: 215-654-0200 or
» READ MORE: www.act2.org
.