

Playwright Sarah Ruhl pays homage to their epistolary romance in "Dear Elizabeth." A lovely if modest gem in a canon that includes jewels such as "Eurydice," "The Clean House," "In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)," this ode to the poetic impulse is beautifully framed in Les Waters' West Coast premiere, which runs through July 7 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. At its best, the play captures both the enchantment of poetry and the alienation of reality in equal measure.

At Berkeley Rep, Mary Beth Fisher and Tom Nelis bring new life to the correspondence between celebrated poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in Dear Elizabeth. Photo: Kevin Berne/Berkeley Rep ( Kevin Berne/Berkeley Rep )

Ruhl and Waters have an affinity for stage pictures that radiate quiet longing ("Eurydice," "Three Sisters") and never is this quality more apparent than in the elegiac "Dear Elizabeth." If this piece never quite feels like a fully realized play instead of a study in letters, there's no denying Ruhl's feeling for language, her delicacy with a craft as fragile as poetry in a culture obsessed with the petty. It's also hard to resist the production's sense of bittersweet nostalgia for an era when communication rated more than 140 characters, when letters between loved ones were expected to be long and leisurely.




The dialogue is drawn from the letters between Lowell and Bishop from their first meeting in 1947 to his death in 1977. Collected in the book "Words in Air," these missives ring out with the epic battle to write poems worthy of their time. It seems they only felt safe expressing their true feelings to each other on paper from miles away. They wrote to each other they way some people pray or meditate, to ground themselves in the spiritual and give their lives meaning.


Missing each other across oceans and continents became their métier. As Lowell wrote: "We seem attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire, so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction."

That melancholy sense of solitude, the hallmark of the poet's life, is deftly distilled here although there are also times when the staging seems too precious. Some tableaus drawn from images in the poems, such as a ladder that leads to the moon, seem overly literal despite the charms of Annie Smart's set. But then it is surely hard to theatricalize the life of the mind. Imagination is a mercurial beast indeed. Other stage pictures, such as a gorgeous wave of crashing water, delight the eye.

Certainly Ruhl's gentle treatment of the poems, the way she finds the breathing space between life and art, can't be overpraised. She crystallizes the magic of what is left unsaid and the piercing intimacy of regret in one beguiling passage after another.



'Dear Elizabeth'

By Sarah Ruhl, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Through: July 7
Where: 2025 Addison St, Berkeley
Running time: one hour, 50 minutes, one intermission