When Michael Disher, the founder and artistic director of Center Stage at the Southampton Arts Center, thought about a production for Valentine’s Day, A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters” naturally came to mind.
“ ‘Love Letters’ is a terrific piece,” he said during a phone conversation. “I did it, and did it well, probably about 10 years ago. It seems like every Valentine’s Day all I see are productions of ‘Love Letters.’ It has to be something different.”
That something different is “Dear Jack, Dear Louise,” an epistolary play by Ken Ludwig that will have its Long Island premiere at the cultural center with four performances starting tomorrow night.
“I’m always looking for shows that are different, that may have an angle, that may have something that interests audiences and also interests me — and that hasn’t been done to death.”
“Dear Jack, Dear Louise” premiered at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 2019 and went on to win the Helen Hayes Award as the best new play of 2020. That’s not Mr. Ludwig’s only award. “Lend Me a Tenor,” his first play, won two Tony Awards and was called “one of the classic comedies of the 20th century” by The Washington Post. It was directed by Jerry Zaks on Broadway and presented in London by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Since then, Mr. Ludwig has written 33 more plays, five of which have played on Broadway and seven on London’s West End. He has won two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Helen Hayes Awards, the Charles MacArthur Award, and the Edwin Forrest award for Contributions to the American Theatre. Barry Edelstein, the artistic director of The Globe Theatre in San Diego, dubbed him “America’s preeminent comic playwright,” but “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” — though not without humor — is something of a departure for Mr. Ludwig.
Jack Ludwig, a U.S. Army captain stationed in Oregon during World War II, begins writing to Louise Rabiner, an aspiring actress and dancer in New York City. He hopes to meet her someday if the war will allow it, but as it drags on, it threatens to end their relationship before it starts.
As the reader might have guessed, “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” is the story of the long-distance courtship of Ken Ludwig’s father and mother, which clearly had a happy ending. The entire play, directed by Mr. Disher and starring Jack Seabury as Jack and Barbara Jo Howard as Louise, consists of the characters reading their letters to each other.
“I had in my mind for a few years to write a play about my mom and dad,” Mr. Ludwig said in a 2020 interview with American Theatre Magazine. “My mom was a really zany, wacky, fun person, very outgoing, and show business was her dream. And Dad was shy — he had a sly sense of humor, and it was sweet, sweet, sweet, but he was quiet. They couldn’t have been more different.”
In the same interview, the playwright admitted that he had to recreate their correspondence, “because my mother actually burned all of the letters. She thought they were too personal and didn’t want anyone to see them. I had to do some imagining.”
Mr. Disher discovered the play while researching plays with two or three characters. “ ‘Dear Jack, Dear Louise’ popped up, and I thought, okay, it’s a two-hander and I love the World War II era. I got a copy of the script and read it and I absolutely fell in love with it.” He has never seen the play performed, which, he said, can be beneficial because he isn’t influenced in any way by another production.
When he first contacted Concord Theatricals, the nontheatrical rights were not on the market. After some time passed, they became available, “but not to me, because of the heinous condition that if you are within 90 miles of New York City and the play is still in production there, you are denied it, for fear it will interfere with a currently playing production.” It took about three and a half years before he was finally granted the rights to premiere it on Long Island.
Mr. Disher is nothing if not tenacious. For example, he’s applied for 25 years in a row for permission to do an amateur production of “Chicago.” Because the show is still running in New York, he has been denied permission every year.
He has worked with Mr. Seabury and Ms. Howard many times over the past 15 years. “It’s not always easy to get Jack or Barbara Jo, because they often have other commitments, but the timing just happened to be right for both of them on this one.”
One rule of the upcoming production is that, as in “Love Letters,” the characters can never look at each other. “We have not had one rehearsal in person yet, partly because I thought that kind of behooves the piece,” said Mr. Disher. “We’ve been doing FaceTime rehearsals, and it’s just been absolutely terrific because they’ve gotten to know each other, but they have to listen to one another. I can see both of them, but they can’t see each other.”
Reviewing the play for New York Stage Review, Steven Suskin said, “The surprise of ‘Dear Jack, Dear Louise,’ Ken Ludwig’s salute to his parents now onstage at 59E59, is that this play-in-letters turns out to be charming, funny, and emotionally involving. . . . Perhaps because he is writing from the heart, he turns these letters into something of a magical long-distance courtship. Which, yes, is funny and smart and heart-warming.”
The entire story will be augmented with black-and-white projections of newsreel footage from the era. “I’m treating the whole thing as a nice World War II movie from 1942 to 1945.”
Performances will take place tomorrow evening at 7, Saturday at 2 and 7, and Sunday at 2. Tickets are $25, $20 for arts center members.
