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Love Letters,Past and Present
Written By: Luke Osteen | Issue: Winter 2024
Highlands-Cashiers Players will stage A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, a romantic fling that lasts a lifetime, at Highlands Performing Arts Center, February 1-4, 8-11.
Rev. Randy Lucas, Foy Tuttle, and Julie Best
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Highlands-Cashiers Players is offering A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters at Highlands Performing Arts Center, February 1-4, 8-11. It stars Julie Best and Rev. Randy Lucas and is directed by Foy Tuttle.
The simple two-character play involving the financially comfortable Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and the equally financially comfortable Melissa Gardner, consists solely of letters exchanged between the two from their meeting in second grade through the decades. It’s a bittersweet tale laced with gentle humor and overlaid with an undeniable poignancy.
Like the best love stories, this production echoes a rosy past – Love Letters was performed in 2003 at Highlands Performing Arts Center with Highlander/Oscar winner Collin Wilcox and New York Film Critic Rex Reed as the two leads.
Wilcox, who had been a professional actress onstage and in film and television for 47 years, began her career at the Highlands Community Theatre (Highlands Playhouse) that was founded by her parents and friends in 1939.
She later studied under the late Lee Strasburg at the Actor’s Studio in New York and in Chicago at the Goodman Memorial School of Drama.
Wilcox and her husband, Scott Paxton, founded the Instant Theatre Company in Highlands in 1981 as the in-house production company of the Highlands Studio for the Arts.
Still, this 2024 incarnation is a mirror into our own unsettled age, and the enduring power of love, made even more poignant as we’re at the far end of a pandemic.
It’s also a testament to the tenacity at the heart of Highlands-Cashiers Players – this is their declaration that they’re ready to shake off the dust of the last three years and once more take the stage, offering “Good Plays, Well Done.”
Visit highlandscashiersplayers.com for tickets to Highlands-Cashiers Players’ Love Letters.
