Nancy McKeon is Bernie from New Jersey, and Johanna Day Mags from Sheffield, England, in Michael Griffo’s Pen Pals.
It’s impossible to discuss Pen Pals, Michael Griffo’s new two-hander at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, without first bringing up A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love Letters consisted of nothing more than two actors reading letters to each other, recounting an epistolary romance spanning almost a half-century. It was so popular because, first of all, it was easy to produce: small set, small cast, and celebrity actors who could jet into town, get onstage, and read the text without having to memorize anything.
Bernie’s school and amateur theatricals include roles in Arsenic and Old Lace, Oklahoma!, and The Lion in Winter. Photographs by Russ Rowland.
Pen Pals is virtually Son of Love Letters, with the tortured affair of its characters, Andrew and Melissa, replaced by the correspondence, beginning in 1955, between Margaret Mary Marsch, henceforth Mags, and Bernadette Patricia O’Brien, or Bernie. Mags is British and proper, while Bernie is as ebullient and typical as a 14-year-old Newark girl can be. They’re set up as pen pals by Bernie’s history teacher, and their letters touch first upon such ordinary young-teen subjects as parents, pets, movie stars (both have a thing for Rock Hudson, an irony that gets rather beaten into the ground), and boys.
But the landscape, of course, expands with the passage of time, as Mags and Bernie recount their home lives, talents, first loves, marriages, children, affairs, and medical crises. It’s based, evidently, on a true story. And Griffo invests it with a credibility, a feel for how women talk and feel, that for a man is positively uncanny. The night I attended the audience was mostly women, but as Mags’s and Bernie’s life events pile up, including the tragic ones, male observers can feel they’re getting a rare look into unfiltered female consciousness.
Like Love Letters, Pen Pals will have a rotating cast. Through Dec. 22, Johanna Day is Mags and Nancy McKeon is Bernie. (Future participant are Catherine Curtin, Sharon Lawrence, Mary Beth Piel, Nia Vardalos, Pauletta Washington, Kate Burton, and more to be announced.)
The young Mags shares with Bernie a passion for Rock Hudson.
It’s no fun to say so, but Day, so far, hasn’t quite found Mags. A fine actor, one who invested Lynn Nottage’s Sweat with a blue-collar sensibility it couldn’t have done without, she is, first of all, not remotely British. The accent is so light as to be barely noticeable, and it keeps veering off into New Jersey. (There’s a dialect consultant, Joel Goldes; he dropped the ball.) Mags is innately reserved, though she sleeps around a lot, and it’s natural that Day would keep Mags’s emotions in check more than McKeon’s more effusive Bernie. But while McKeon responds emotionally to Mags’s letters as they’re being read, Day generally doesn’t. Presumably she’ll grow into the role; director Suzanne Barabas might begin by encouraging her to work on those Sheffield diphthongs.
McKeon, meanwhile, has Bernie down pat. At first a sort of Gidget, uninhibited and observant in a teen-girl sort of way, she matures into a thoughtful young woman who marries, fairly happily but not ideally; struggles to have kids; copes with recurring breast cancer (5% of the box office, incidentally, goes to research); and finds ways to express herself, especially through school plays and community theater. McKeon gets laughs on body language alone, never mind her expert comic timing. It’s an affecting journey, and if you get teary as Bernie and Mags finally meet in person after 47 years of letters, you won’t be alone.
Pen Pals shares a vibe with another show playing a few blocks away, Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth; both are feel-good chronicles of women who fight off illnesses and find fulfillment in self-expression. Like Left on Tenth, it’s comfort food for a fairly specific demographic, though you don’t have to belong to that demo to enjoy it. The chronology gets a bit confusing (some letters are preceded by their dates, some aren’t), and there’s not a great deal of visual excitement in Jessica Parks’s modest set, David C. Woolard’s barely noticeable costumes, or Jill Nagle’s lighting. But Pen Pals is a cozy night out, a sharing of distaff confidences that may well follow a production trajectory not unlike that of Love Letters. The playout music is Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend. An inspired choice.
Pen Pals runs through Feb. 9 at the Theatre at St. Clement’s (423 West 46th St.). Evening performances are at Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m., Thursday at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., and at 8 p.m. Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturday and at 3 p.m. on Sunday. There are also Monday performances at 7 p.m. on Dec. 16 and Jan. 6. No Wednesday performances on Dec. 25 or Jan. 1. Tickets may be purchased online at penpalsplay.com.
Playwright: Michael Griffo
Director: Suzanne Barabas
Scenic Design: Jessical Parks
Costume Consultant: David C. Woolard
Lighting Design: Jill Nagle
Sound Design: Nicholas Simone
