In ‘Dear Elizabeth,’ Two Brilliant Poets Still Don’t Find What They’re Looking For
YOU HAD ME AT HELLO. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, the subjects and voices of Sarah Ruhl’s play “Dear Elizabeth.” in Brazil in the 1970s, Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline portray them in a streaming version shown in June.
“THERE’S SOMETHING HAUNTING AND nihilistic about your hairdresser,” Robert Lowell writes to his favorite woman friend, Elizabeth Bishop. A little later, in a letter to to him, Bishop suggests, “You must say that I was the loneliest person you ever knew.”
Don’t you love eavesdropping on smart people?
(A friend of mine signed up to watch without reading the announcement carefully. She was expecting Robert Browning’s letters to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But she was far from disappointed.)
The playwright Sarah Ruhl.
Lowell and Bishop – who were avowed soul mates (and might have been more, but Bishop was gay) – published their letters over three decades in “Words in Air.” Sarah Ruhl, whose earlier plays had included “The Clean House,” “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)” and “For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday,” turned some of those letters into “Dear Elizabeth.” Anyone who has suggested that her play is an adaptation has been promptly corrected; the play is “an arrangement.”
The two poets’ lives are certainly worth writing about. There are interludes in Maine, at Bard College and at Yaddo, the writers’ retreat. He goes into psychotherapy – a good idea because he keeps getting institutionalized (bipolar disorder?). She runs away to live for a while in Key West, Fla. — and later in Brazil, where her lover commits suicide. He fathers a baby late in life. She wins a Pulitzer Prize. They both drink.
It doesn’t hurt at all that Bishop and Lowell are played by Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline (in photo), whom we’ve seen together before -- notably onscreen in “Sophie’s Choice” (1982) and, if you were lucky, in “The Seagull,” when Shakespeare in the Park did it in 2001.
I’ve seen my share of epistolary plays before, but this may well be the first I’ve watched as a split-screen video. I suppose it’s not remarkable how well suited the genre is to the medium, but it is worth noting that we never get tired of being in the presence of enormous talent.
Even the unseen narrator (Polly Noonan), who relays the stage directions, has an opportunity to relay poetic touches. At one point she mentions Christmas music, “the kind that plays in a store and makes you want to jump off a bridge.”
When “Dear Elizabeth” played on real stages — it opened at the Yale Repertory Theater (in New Haven) in 2012 and in New York (Off Broadway) three years later — it was not universally welcomed. The Time Out reviewer seemed annoyed that Lowell and Bishop even liked each other. She called the play “a bit of a slog” and ridiculed it as “ ‘Love Letters’ for the lit set.” (The review was written in 2015, so we must infer that she meant “lit” as an abbreviation for literary and not the currently fashionable adjective of admiration.)
Kathleen Chalfant and Harris Yulin in a 2015 Off Broadway production of “Dear Elizabeth.”
Another Time Out critic, seeing a different production in 2019, described the play as “more like a haunted house, restoring power to emotional shocks sketched out in pen and ink.” Yes! And even Charles Isherwood of The New York Times had to acknowledge, in 2015, its “fine ear for emotional detail and the glistening phrase.” “Dear Elizabeth” is about loss — maybe all plays are — and its converse: what might have been.
Along the way, Lowell refers in a letter to Bishop to “the other life that might have been had.” A memory of the two sitting at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, on a large rock, talking seriously and then getting up to leave. Lowell recalls, “In the end, the water was too cold for us.”
“Dear Elizabeth,” by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Kate Whoriskey for Spotlight on Plays. Streamed from June 17 through June 21 (2021) as a benefit for the Actors Fund and the Acting Company.