A moving, innovative play based on one of the greatest correspondences in literary history
From 1947 to 1977, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged more than four hundred letters. Describing the writing of their poems, their travel and daily illnesses, the pyrotechnics of their romantic relationships, and the profound affection they had for each other, these missives are the most intimate record available of both poets and one of the greatest correspondences in American literature.
The playwright Sarah Ruhl fell in love with these letters and set herself an unusual challenge: to turn this thirty-year exchange into a stage play, and to bring to life the friendship of two writers who were rarely even in the same country. As innovative as it is moving, Dear Elizabeth gives voice to a conversation that lived mostly in writing, illuminating some of the finest poems of the twentieth century and the minds that produced them.
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“‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master,’ Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her poem ‘One Art,’ most likely thinking, in part, of her lifelong friend, poet Robert Lowell. Both poets won numerous awards for their works, and both went on to define American verse in the 1950s and ’60s. In this deft and intimate examination of their thirty-year relationship, film stalwarts JoBeth Williams and Julian Sands deliver Bishop’s and Lowell’s own words through the many letters they wrote back and forth. This production, recorded before a live audience, allows Williams and Sands to lift the words from the written correspondence and turn them into a true conversation between equals about life, longing, and loss.”
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