Love Letters

One of the recent assignments in Company was a request I made for every member to write a love letter and to bring it with them to class sealed in an envelope. I gave no other direction then it should be a letter of passion. I assured the students of the following:
It would never leave your sight.
It would never be opened.
It would never be collected.

Students were most confused. I do that a lot to them in class . . .Then the questions began . . .

• Does it have to be a boyfriend?
• What about a sibling?
• What about a parent?
• What about myself?
• What about this class? (okay – I lied – – they never asked the bit about lovin’ the class)

And to each question I offered the response – “You choose. It is your love letter.”

This afternoon they timidly brought there letters to class. Some held them in their hands the entire day  Some kept it safely tucked away in the inner pocket of their inner pocket of their backpack. One even wore her letter as a necklace. They took this lesson seriously to say the least.

After our warm up we brought out the letters and passed them UNOPENED around in a circle. They watched intensely as their letter made its way from hand to hand and back to them. You could tell their pulse rose. Many were sweating a bullet or two. Then we piled them into the middle and sat around the “sacred pile” of letters. We talked about the art of love letters and the connection letter writing has to the world of an artist and the theatre artist in particular. The follow came up in their talk:

• They mentioned that it was impossible to do this on a computer; they craved a pen and paper.
• They said that what began as a love letter changed over to hate – but then they owned that both love and hate are but different flavors of the same energy.
• They said that although they didn’t have THE boyfriend, they were surprised to know how many other types of love they had.
• They said that their letter often ran to the cliche – but cliche was nothing to be embarrassed about. Cliche became cliche for a reason.
• They said that it was just too damn hard for words to get the trick done. (Exactly my point! The actor must see the words as only a springboard to the moment. They will never be able to do the deed alone.)
• The letter made them feel vulnerable.
• The letter made them feel risk as they carried around with them.
• They claimed that the secrets locked in the letter had kept then on edge all day.

They class went on and on about personal insights they had from the simple writing of a love letter. They were then able to easily connect the writing of love letters to the wonderful, uncomfortable, vulnerable world of the artist and the actor.

I finished the class with my personal view of love letters in the theatre. All plays and all scenes are love scenes. Every moment in a play is fueled by a love letter that never got written, a love letter that was written and never sent, a letter that was written, sent but never read – or in the most beautiful sense a love letter that made its way to the destination.

The actor becomes a simple mailman tending to the delivery of fictional love letters – and as they say on the facade of the US Postal Office in NYC: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds