Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again : A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again

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.

“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.” —Karen D'Souza, San Jose Mercury News

“Ruhl delicately explores, through nothing more than the letters and her own theatrical imagination, the solitude of the artist, the exactitude of the writer's craft, the balance between confession and privacy and, in the end, why poetry matters.” —Frank Rizzo, Variety

“Dear Elizabeth mesmerizes in every way. An articulate, imaginative, and moving theatrical experience. . . . uniquely its own engaging creation. In an age of mutilated language and truncated texts, such a play commands every ounce of our attention.” —E. Kyle Minor, New Haven Register

“Watching poets, even eminent poets, read and write to each other shouldn't be half as gripping as playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Les Waters make it in Dear Elizabeth.” —Robert Hurwitt, SFGate

“Playwright Sarah Ruhl and her director and frequent collaborator Les Waters have re-set the rules and raised the bar for epistolary theatre in their bracing, moving and theatrically exciting production.” —Andrew Beck, Hartford Examiner

“Riveting. A moving, funny, and highly theatrical experience.” —Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post