Life through the lines

By Chen Jie (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-12-29 15:41

Love Letters might be one of the least dramatic plays you've seen but also the most warm and touching one in the cold winter. The 100-minute play is pure minimalism.

It just features a man and a woman sitting at two sides of the stage, reading 70 letters written to each other over the previous half-century. All they have on stage are a seesaw and a school blackboard, while off-stage a violin is playing.

Li Zhengguo (the man) and Chen Shufen are elementary school classmates who use the letters to review their hopes and ambitions, dreams and disappointments, victories and defeats throughout their separated lives from middle school to death. Only at the sad ending do they realize they were really love letters all along.

However, the aurally challenging play turns out to be a passionate exploration of two preppies as they grow up, miss each other romantically and discover the power of words in the process.

The play was adapted by Taiwan director Shan Chengju based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same title written by A. R. Gurney. The original play was staged hundreds of times on and off Broadway in 1989. A number of famous actors and actress have been drawn to these "star-crossed lovers", including Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones, who performed it for a charity event in New York last December.

Now, the director Shan revives it at the Experiment Theater in Beijing People's Art Theater.

Shan portrays this lifelong correspondence between Chen and Li as a celebration of a relationship, which is as unusual as it is beautiful, as exclusive as it is intimate

"The power of the script is in the connection that the two make without ever looking at each other," says Bai Hui who plays Chen in the new production. "They talk, they react and the words do the rest. Time passes in a recognizable, hilarious and heart-wrenching way."

Sha Yi, who plays Li, agrees. "No special set, no memorizing of lines - it is designed simply to be read aloud by an actor and an actress of roughly the same age. Some letters are light-hearted, teasing. Others carried heavy thoughts. But there are characters, stories, emotions and all that a drama must have. And when they stop reading the last letter and the theater light, you will find tears in the audience's eyes."

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