Dead Letter Office

Believe it or not, I try very hard to know as little as possible about a play before I see it. That isn’t easy, what with my often doing features on shows before they open and what with friends calling me in the middle of the night to tell me who’s working on what, which scripts have been optioned or scheduled for production, and so on. I don’t read any critics’ reviews until I’ve seen a show but, still, it’s a rare occurrence when I don’t know a thing about a show as I walk in the door.

But that’s what happened when I attended Address Unknown at the Promenade. Once I was in my seat, I did learn from the program that this was Frank Dunlop’s adaptation of Kathrine Kressman Taylor’s novel and that it was a two-character play wherein Max Eisenstein would be played by Jim Dale and Martin Schulse would be played by William Atherton. “The play is set in the office of a San Francisco art gallery, and in a country mansion near Munich, Germany. It begins in November 1932 and ends March 1934,” read the program note. Okay. Got it.

The German and the Jew are friends but then, because of politics, they aren’t anymore. What I didn’t anticipate was that the play would be constructed in what is my least favorite dramatic structure: the epistolary form, in which an actor recites a letter that his character writes and another actor recites a letter that his character writes back. One monologue after another, always with one character following another. Symmetry can be so boring!

The first epistolary play I encountered was Jerome Kilty’s Dear Love in November, 1969 — and, even though I had that experience nearly 35 years ago, it still holds the record as The Show I Left the Quickest. After nine minutes, I was out in the night air. (Second place? Moose Murders, 11 minutes. It was a preview, and had I known how notorious that opening night/closing night
disaster was destined to become, I might have stuck it out.)Still, I stayed in my seat and listened to Dale and Atherton bring to quasi-life each of the elements of a letter that we all learned about in grammar school: the heading (address, city, state, and country), the salutation (Dear Max; Dear Martin), the body (what each had to say), and the complimentary close (Sincerely yours). I thought, “This show will have another kind of complimentary close: It will give out lots of complimentary tickets and then close.”

Also not for me is a play where the two actors almost never look at each other. That’s what happens here: Max is writing in San Francisco while Martin is penning his thoughts in Germany. The thing is, they don’t look at the audience, either. Epistolary plays don’t really offer actors the chance to make any eye contact with the audience because, of course, we’re not supposed to be out there as the characters are writing their private thoughts. And when each character looks down at the letter he’s writing and reads aloud, I suddenly feel as if I’m at a staged reading. Yes, there are some lighting effects in Address Unknown: The lights come up on Max when he’s reading a letter, then they fade on him when it’s Martin’s turn. They stay up on Martin until he’s finished, then they fade on him and come up on Max. Guess what happens next?

The coughs from audience members started pretty early in the show. Soon thereafter, the theatergoer seated directly behind me emitted a heavy sigh, which almost made me turn around and say to him, “Precisely.” This is a shame for there would be real drama in Address Unknown; if only Dunlop would have dramatized the work and not taken the easy, economical way out. We all know deep in our hearts, don’t we, the reason why Dunlop chose to write a two-character epistolary play? Such a piece has a better chance of getting produced.

The play has a terrific plot twist — so terrific that I feel compelled not to give it away, just in case you plan to attend. (I do think the title gives away too much.) But while Max talks about a beloved sister and Martin has a meeting with soldiers, we’d be better off seeing them. After all, isn’t the First Rule of Drama to bring the action on stage and not keep it off? In other words, “Show, don’t tell.” Yet most epistolary plays tell quite a bit and show precious little.

As much as I love A.R. Gurney, I blame him for all of this. His Love Letters, wherein successive pairs of guest stars merely came in and read from books on tables, started out in the 499-seat Edison Theatre but it wasn’t long before the show was playing the 1,246 seat Wilbur in Boston — and I’ll bet it played even bigger venues than that. I’m glad I didn’t have to sit in the second balcony in some mammoth house and look down at the pin-sized heads of two people reading letters aloud; that wouldn’t make me sing, “That’s Entertainment!”

I also gave a fleeting thought to The Fan, the 1977 Bob Randall novel in which a diva-obsessed show freak writes to his favorite star and, when she doesn’t answer, stalks her with plans to kill her. The book is structured as letters, and while I hate epistolary plays, I don’t mind epistolary novels. Letters are meant to be read to oneself, not read aloud by actors. Still, when Hollywood got around to The Fan, did it just have person after person reading letters? No — it dramatized the story. Some say that the film didn’t turn out so well but I guarantee you that it was far more entertaining than it would have been had every letter writer simply read his opus aloud.

Address Unknown ended and I went home and opened New York magazine, where John Simon started his review of the play with, “Episolary theater is an iffy business, correspondence being by definition a non-dramatic activity.” It’s not often that I agree with what Simon says and get even huffier about it, but now’s the time. That night, I had ample time to read every review of Address Unknown, because the play is all of 75 minutes long. What happened to the days when we saw two one-act plays for the price of one, rather than one one-act play for the price of what now seems like two, three, or four? We’ll leave that question for another day.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]