‘Love Letters’ At The Senior Center

By Nancy K. Crevier

Valentine’s Day may have been the week before, but the Newtown Senior Center on Riverside Road was awash in the glow of love letters, Wednesday, February 20.

Richard Clark, in his sixth performance at the Newtown Senior Center and Lynne McKenney Lydick, appearing for the first time at the center, cast a spell Wednesday afternoon over a full crowd with their performance of the 1989 Broadway hit Love Letters by A.R. Gurney.

“We are very excited to have Mr Clark here again,” said Senior Center director Marilyn Place. “Richard Clark is extremely popular throughout the area. We actually booked this performance a year ago.”

The play, originally produced at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, covers the relationship of wealthy Melissa Gardner and the less wealthy but upwardly mobile Andrew Ladd III from the time of Andrew’s response to Melissa’s seventh birthday invitation in 1937 through the tumultuous years that lead to adulthood and the trials therein. The letters, read back and forth by Ms Lydick and Mr Clark seated side-by-side in wing-backed chairs, elicited laughter and tears from the attentive audience as the fictional characters’ penned words of jealousies, jokes, holiday greetings, unrequited love, heartbreak, failures, successes, and eternal friendship came to life. Using only a few props and body language, the two actors grew before the eyes of those watching from gangling children, legs draped over the arms of their chairs, to awkward adolescents, to adults, one filled with self-confidence, the other less so.

Although Andrew is completely at home with letter writing, “I feel most alive when I am holed up in a corner writing things down,” he pens as a young man to Melissa, she is rather more reluctant of a pen pal, “I have to write letters — which I hate,” she responds to one of his missives. Nonetheless, it is the words that carry them through the decades, that cement the friendship through thick and thin, and bring Andrew too late to the conclusion that what they have is actually a collection of love letters.

 From the first words to the last, Mr Clark and Ms Lydick drew in the audience, so that not one minute of the hourlong performance failed to hold each and every person’s undivided attention.

Lynne McKenney Lydick has appeared on stage in musicals, comedies, dramas, mystery dinner theaters, and children’s theater. She has also performed as Abby Kelley Foster in the one-woman play Yours for Humanity — Abby, about the 19th Century woman’s rights advocate with whom she shares the conviction “that all people are created equal and deserve to be free.”

Richard Clark has performed for more than 30 years in New England regional and New York theaters, movies, and television. In recent years he has focused on a series of one-person shows that bring to life historical characters for community audiences throughout New England. Mr Clark has previously brought his Mark Twain, Clarence Darrow, John Barrymore, Andrew Carnegie, and William Shakespeare performances to the Newtown Senior Center.