STAGE REVIEW : ‘Love Letters’ Only Bright Spot in Manipulative Tale

SAN DIEGO —  There is only one thing worse than a play that manipulates an audience’s emotions by dishing out cliches rather than earning them honestly through telling the truth.

And that’s a play that TRIES to manipulate those emotions--but fails miserably.

“Love Letters on Blue Paper,” now in a San Diego premiere at the North Coast Repertory Theatre, falls, alas, into the second category.

The plot of this 90-minute one-act play can be summed up simply: A vigorous, colorful old labor union leader, Victor, is dying of cancer and frightened of his impending death. He tries to fill his remaining days thinking about art--he wants to write a book on the subject.

While he shares his ideas with his friend, Maurice, Victor’s silent, hard-working housewife, Sonia, brings him a letter each day, written on blue paper and telling him of her love.

The twist, such as it is, is that Silent Sonia turns out not only to have feelings but can express them beautifully. And that this woman, whose previous interactions with her husband were bearing the children, fixing the food, changing the sheets and polishing the furniture, ends up, through her letters, providing the emotional support he needs to go gentle into that good night.

It’s tear-jerker material--or could be if all the dramatic circuits were hooked up. But they’re not.

The main circuit breaker here is--incredibly--Sonia and Victor themselves. For some reason, British playwright Arnold Wesker hardly ever has the two progress beyond Sonia’s letter-writing stage. They don’t interact and we don’t even get to see Victor’s reaction as he reads the letters, because he hands them to Maurice to read. At the very end of Victor’s life, he is confiding his final thoughts to Maurice and not to his wife who, for her part, does not seem at all disturbed to enter the room and find him dead.

Even after she waxes on in her letters about how his life defined hers (yes, ladies, she was nothing before she met him), he never even tells her he loves her. And she doesn’t seem to mind!

Maybe this is what is meant by a stiff upper lip. Unfortunately, it makes for a rather stiff play. And the direction by Daniel Yurgaitis does nothing to smooth over the bumps and the dead spots.

There are some stirring moments--they begin and end with Sonia’s letters, eloquently read by Irene Winfield as Sonia. Winfield’s clean, uncluttered performance is the play’s one asset. She is not enough, however, to make up for the long and incredibly boring exchanges between Victor and Maurice. Part of the problem there is that both Mel Schuster as Victor and Punit Auerbacher as Maurice have been terribly miscast.

Schuster gives us Victor as a prosaic, salt of the earth bloke, when he is supposed to be a charismatic, inspiring and inspired leader of men. And the friendship between Victor and Maurice doesn’t ring true. One gets distracted by the disparity in their age (not to mention the disparity in bad English accents), wondering how they sustained a friendship across a generation gap and across such different life choices for so many years.

Rick Pool does a nice, short turn as a smarmy young trade union official whose smiling hypocrisy makes Victor think all his work was for naught.

The design team also provides good support. Leslee Baren, who has been building sets for North Coast since 1986, successfully turns her hands to design--giving the company several distinct playing surfaces to work with inside and outside the couple’s house. And John-Bryan Davis’ costumes are simple and effective, without drawing attention to themselves.

While the play has its moments, it does not sustain momentum. The letters stand out like a light in a lighthouse on a troubled night at sea, but they make a favorable impression, in part, because the sea on which they shine is so dark.

Taken by themselves, these letters are a far cry from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s exquisite love letters to her husband, “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” And there is even a quaintness about it that is disturbing in the light of today’s headlines.

Sonia tells us that she owes her entire sense of purpose to Victor, that she was a blank sheet before she met him, that she has turned away from God and toward him. This is the kind of thinking that could lead to a very different outcome than we see here. Shades of women like Betty Broderick who, on losing their husbands, lose their identities and became desperate in an all-consuming vacuum.

“LOVE LETTERS ON BLUE PAPER”

By Arnold Wesker. Director is Daniel Yurgaitis. Set by Leslee Baren. Lighting by Patrick Byrnes. Costumes/wigs by John-Bryan Davis. Sound by Marvin Read. Stage manager is Rick Pool. With Mel Schuster, Irene Winfield, Punit Auerbacher and Rick Pool. At 8 p.m. Thursday-Daturday and 7 p.m. Sundays with Sunday matinees at 2 through May 23. Tickets are $12-14 with $2 discount for seniors, students military. At Lomas Santa Fe Plaza, Solana Beach. Call 481-1055.