New Haven Theater Company member J. Kevin Smith is a decidedly patient man. Way back in the theater season 2023-2024 Sarah Ruhl’s invitingly intimate play “Dear Elizabeth” was selected to be the first production of the company’s new season. One week before opening a bad accident to a cast member cancelled the show. Now J. Kevin Smith is indulging in second chances and will direct the series of letters, 80 out of the original 450, penned between two famous poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, that track their close relationship, a friendship that lasted for thirty years.
New Haven Theater Company will open with “Dear Elizabeth" on Thursday, November 7 and run for the next two weekends, entering their personal lives, from the time they were introduced by a fellow poet at a dinner party and realized they’d like to spend more time together indulging in their mutual love of poetry. Only Robert’s death ended their special connection.
Two newer troop members Sandra Rodriguez and Ralph Buonocore, with visiting artist Abby Klein, will portray Elizabeth and Robert, both Poet Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. Even though they were often geographically apart in different countries their friendship spanned years and separation but was always warm and sentimentally close. Letter writing may seem to be a lost art today but for these two their connection with pen and paper was a valuable lifeline between their minds and hearts. It didn’t seem to matter if he was in Italy and she in Brazil or if he was in Maine and she in Key West, their spirts were united. They both spoke in poetry, she writing traditionally of her own experience and he revealing his soul for all to see, like a father’s confessional. She was not a big fan of his way of communicating.a
J. Kevin Smith hopes audiences will come away with a sense of the beauty of friendship, one inspired by love. As our current political angst grows, he wants them to see it as a sense of escape, a way to feel better about the world. He wants their intimate stories, how they supported each other through their problems and boosted each other’s spirits, to leave the audience feeling better than when they came in the door.
For tickets ($25), go online to www.newhaventheatercompany.com. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m. and Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the back of EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel Street, New Haven.
Calling upon the elements of nature, from water to planets to the moon, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell promise each other a starry eternity.
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