Playwrights: Bryan Renaud and Carin Silkaitis. At: The Other Theatre Company at Side Project, 1439 W. Jarvis Ave. Tickets: TheOtherTheatreCompany.com; $25. Runs through Feb. 29
The Other Theatre Company could have trotted out Love Letters like so many other organizations that have produced A.R. Gurney's 1989 drama for fundraising purposes. But instead, Other Theatre Company has only taken their inspiration from Love Letters and is now offering up Other Letters as an original fundraiser for future productions.
Like Love Letters, the premise and production costs for Other Letters look relatively simple. It's just two seated actors reading from scripts detailing the long course of two lovers' lives through a series of alternating letters starting in childhood.
And like Love Letters' original off-Broadway production and its Broadway transfers in 1989 and 2014, Other Letters features alternating casts. New York had many celebrity pairings, but Other Letters stars luminaries of Chicago's theater scene.
But where Love Letters focused on a heterosexual pairing, Other Letters features two alternating scripts focusing on a lesbian or gay duo. Be sure to visit The Other Theatre Company's website to see which actors are rotation and whether or not you'll be getting a lesbian love story or a gay male one.
The night I caught Other Letters, it was a partial reunion for TimeLine Theatre's Jeff Award-winning production of The History Boys since it featured two of its stars: Alex Weisman and Will Allan. The duo won't be performing Other Letters again, so my advice for future actors taking on the roles is to not have their eyes glued exclusively to the text ( like Allan ) and to look up as often as possible to share the character's inner turmoil with audiences ( like Weisman ).
As for the gay male script of Other Letters, playwrights Bryan Renaud and Carin Silkatis do a wonderful modern-day riff on Gurney's original text and concept, starting up the action a few decades later, in the 1980s. I didn't catch the lesbian version, but I did overhear Silkatis mentioning how the two scripts share the same structure and only have slight variations to suit the different genders.
Other Letters starts poignantly as two kids write three reasons why they like each other. From this third-grade assignment, a life-long relationship blossoms.
But it's not all rosy, since one of the characters deals with bullying in school, religious reparative therapy and an alcohol problem that develops in college. The other, more confident character enters into a heterosexual marriage and struggles with depression after moving to New York.
That the timings rarely work out for the two is a given ( it's a drama after all ), but Other Letters also serves as a great reminder to the shifts in perception over the past three decades to gay and lesbian lives as seen through two people's lovelorn eyes.