"Dear Master" at Aurora Theatre Company

Aurora photo by David Allen

I hadn't realized it until this week, but I guess there is a genre of plays that derive from the correspondence of writers. A few years back I thought Berkeley Rep did a really nice job with Sarah Ruhl's "Dear Elizabeth," which came from the ongoing correspondence between poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Lowell. Just this week I saw a reference to a reading that ACT will be doing in a couple of weeks of Jerome Kilty's "Dear Liar," based on correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell.

And to complete the "Dear X" theme, tonight we saw Aurora's revival of "Dear Master" by Dorothy Bryant. Leading off Aurora's 25th anniversary season, they've gone back to the very first production of their first season, by a local writer. So now I know that correspondence plays are a thing. Go figure.

The Play

The difficulty of these plays, of course, is that the characters are interacting, but at a distance. Director Joy Carlin has staged the play such that each character, inhabiting their respective studios, faces  the other when writing or reading at their desk, and they often step away from the desk, usually toward the other, so you do get a sense that the dialogue happens in something like real time, though in fact days (at least) must pass between the writing and the reading.

It's nicely handled, with the first few exchanges taking place with a character actually writing on paper, and the other reading a page at the same time. Once we have that idea established, they drop that conceit and move and speak a bit more naturally.

So what we have in "Dear Master" is correspondence between two French writers of the 19th century, Gustave Flaubert (Michael Ray Wisely) and George Sand (Kimberly King), and as you might expect, much of the discussion is about writing and writers, but topics range broadly over love and family life, politics and revolution, and all sorts of matters large and small. Given that I had only cursory knowledge of either writer coming in, they managed to portray both (and especially Sand) as deep, complex, and fascinating.

The Production

The intimate setting of Aurora's stage provides an ideal setting for such an intimate play, so although the characters are "conversing" at a distance, the audience is right there, often closer to the speaker than the other character is. That's generally great, though it must be extra frustrating for the actors when someone in the front row nods off, as happened more than once tonight, sad to say.

The pacing is well done, however, and the 90-minute (no intermission) play holds interest throughout. The staging itself is necessarily pretty simple: each writer has a desk and chair in a period-appropriate style. Each also has a small living space with a sofa or chaise longue that provides another place to settle, though unfortunately with backs turned to the audience. The desks, at the corners, do a better job of maintaining sight lines.

I thought a particularly nice touch was the use of characters leaving the stage at times, representing points when they had to disengage from the discussion because of other events in their lives. With the remaining character sending repeated inquiries as to why no response is forthcoming, it gives a good feel for the difficulty of maintaining a long correspondence, and also reminds the audience that despite the theatrical presentation, this discussion really did take place over long distance and time.

Overall

I enjoyed the production. I thought it was a good insight into both the lives of two rather isolated intellectuals in mid-19th century France, as well as illustrating the importance of correspondence in developing and maintaining a lively life of the mind.

I have to say, it also really made me want to see a play about Ivan Turgenev, who is frequently mentioned as a mutual friend of both writers, providing a nice bridge to other works, notably Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia," in which Turgenev is sort of a vagabond friend to all the intelligentsia. It seems as if a play that actually centered on him could be a lot of fun, as nearly every other European intellectual of the time would pass through.

All in all, it's a good play and worth seeing. The acting is quite good, and the production is fine. Not spectacular, but a comfortable and thought-provoking evening.