The more you know about Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, the richer you’ll find Sarah Ruhl’s poem-and-postal two-person drama “Dear Elizabeth.”
The Remy Bumppo production at Lake View’s Theater Wit follows more than 30 years of private letters between Bishop and Lowell. The primary problem is that until the second act of the 100-minute drama really gets going, the letters — and the intertwined lives of the writers — are hard to invest in: It’s like hearing two people you really don’t know converse long-distance with a communicative shorthand you’re not always privy to.
Directed by Christina Casano and unfolding via missives penned between 1947 and 1977, “Dear Elizabeth” portrays a relationship that doesn’t always resonate or feel especially authentic.
Ruhl’s text lets the audience glimpse the complicated worlds of Bishop and Lowell, but more often leaves them looking through a glass, murkily, at their eventful lives. The letters speak of major events and traumas, but it’s often left to the audience to piece together the context surrounding them.
The drama is primarily epistolary, with poetry interwoven among the letter-reading. Echoing the structure in A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” Bishop (Leah Karpel) and Lowell (Christopher Sheard) sometimes interact directly with each other, reading their dispatches as if they’re conversing. But just as often, Karpel and Sheard are stuck reading past each other or toward the audience, which dims any spark of on-stage connection. There’s no palpable affection between them, even when Lowell admits that he almost proposed to Bishop early in their relationship and that a marriage to her will forever be the “other life” he could have had and will always wonder about.
Both Bishop and Lowell faced formidable demons as their writing careers skyrocketed. Lowell’s “mania” (today he’d probably be diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder) saw him hospitalized in more than a dozen mental institutions over his career, 12 times alone between 1949 and 1964. Bishop had asthma and struggled with depression and drinking: At one point, Ruhl has her downing a bottle of what looks like rubbing alcohol then retching into a trashcan as Lowell narrates his latest letter.
The first half of “Dear Elizabeth” feels almost incomplete. Lowell’s illness seems almost goofy initially — with a grin plastered on his face, he’s in and out of his first hospital with barely a mention of how he got there. It’s not until we get to the second half of the production when what he’s been dealing with briefly flashes to the surface. He describes mania brilliantly post-intermission: “My disease, alas, gives one a headless heart.” The superficial humor of the first act’s depiction of his illness melts into something darker, and tragic.
The letters fly between poets as they cross continents and occasionally meet in person. In Maine, Bishop almost proposes. In Brazil, Bishop finds longtime love in architect Lota de Macedo Soares, and devastation when after almost a decade the relationship comes to a brutal end. Robert leaves his first wife, marries celebrated writer Elizabeth Hardwick, has a daughter, an affair, another divorce, and marries a third time between hospitalizations, publications and awards. Bishop wins the Pulitzer in 1956.
But all of these momentous events feel muted, as if occurring in some muffled off-stage world that the audience can’t really see.
That said, there are two extraordinary moments in “Dear Elizabeth.” One arrives with Karpel’s devastating reading of “One Art,” Bishop’s iconic poem about loss. Karpel’s understated delivery is calm as a windless lake yet has the piercing potency of a flaming arrow. It’s a passage that will burrow into the hearts of anyone who has ever lost something or someone they truly loved.
The other moment comes as Lowell prepares to publish “The Dolphin,” which includes private letters from the writer Hardwick, his second wife. Bishop becomes as passionate as we see her, calling Lowell’s work a massive betrayal of trust, its words telling a story that wasn’t Lowell’s to tell. (Unsaid in Ruhl’s play: He publishes anyway and wins his second Pulitzer for the work in 1973.)
Set designer Catalina Niño has two cluttered desks amid a series of screens in subtle ombre that moves from palest orange to sky blue, the backdrop serving to hold projection designer John Boeshe’s serene images of foaming waves and autumnal leaves. Supertitles indicating locales and significant poems help ground each scene.
Bishop and Lowell were incendiary writers with lives and loves more complex than a Russian novel. “Dear Elizabeth” scratches the surface.