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Ralph Buonocore.
It’s been years since Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell met, and in that time, the literary stars of both poets have risen. They have each moved from place to place in the United States and beyond, and chased and acquired romantic partners. They are living lives, on one level, that seem full of realized ambitions. And yet none of that stops Lowell from writing to Bishop, long into their correspondence, that “I seem to spend my life missing you.”
Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth — running now at New Haven Theater Company through Nov. 16 — tells the story of the complex, impassioned friendship between Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra Rodriguez) and Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore), two of the most revered poets of the mid-20th century, related just about entirely through excerpts from their decades-long, voluminous correspondence of over 400 letters they wrote to each other, as their literary reputations rose, continents were crossed, and each of them engaged in complex personal lives (Lowell was married three times and Bishop was in a same-sex relationship with a Brazilian aristocrat). They almost never seem to be in the same place at the same time — as Lowell writes to her, “we seem attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire, so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction” — yet a certain spark between them is undeniable.
Sandra Rodriguez
Ruhl’s play works by keeping that spark glowing through the decades, and Rodriguez and Buonocore use that spark to create a long, slow smolder between them. Rodriguez excels at bringing out Bishop’s keen intelligence, a certain detachment that lets her see things perhaps more clearly than Lowell does, but also her clear affection for her fellow poet. Buonocore, meanwhile, brings out a charisma and disarming frankness in Lowell that lets the audience see both how he falls for her and what she sees in him. Ruhl also deploys an almost completely silent third character, Brigit (Abby Klein), who is in some sense the ruthless personification of the passage of time and changing circumstances that, but for a few fleeting moments of their lives, keep the poets apart. Under J. Kevin Smith’s direction, this tight play moves fast — which, in a play about a relationship that spans decades, makes it all the more poignant.
Ruhl’s ingeniousness with the material is to craft a satisfying drama without once straying from the language of the letters or the facts as we know them — a feat she even manages to call attention to when, later in the play, Bishop castigates Lowell for playing faster and looser with the facts of his own relationships to try to make his poetry work better. “Art just isn’t worth that much,” Bishop writes. Dear Elizabeth is proof that the material of Bishop’s and Lowell’s lives are more than enough.
It helps, of course, that the pens of both poets are so rich. Whatever the twists and turns their lives take, however they grow together, apart, together and apart, the moment-for-moment pleasure of Dear Elizabeth is to revel in the way both Bishop and Lowell used language and told their own stories, sometimes to entertain, sometimes to elide their feelings, and sometimes to be about as achingly, emotionally honest with one another as two people could be, even with — or was it because of? — the thousands of miles between them. Both of them expressed, at various points in their lives, the sense that there was a masterpiece within them they never quite managed to create. It’s possible to imagine that, over the hundreds of pages they wrote to each other for much of their adult lives, maybe they wrote that masterpiece together.
New Haven Theater Company’s Dear Elizabeth runs at the theater’s space at EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St., Thursday, November 14 at 7:30 pm., and Friday and Saturday, November 8, 9, 15 and 16 at 8 p.m. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.