Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy will launch the upcoming Broadway revival of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters. The rotating cast will then feature Alan Alda, Candice Bergen, Stacy Keach, Diana Rigg, Anjelica Huston, Martin Sheen and Carol Burnett.
The production begins previews September 13 at the Nederlander Theater ahead of a September 18 opening. Dennehy will stay for a second month to star opposite Burnett, with whom he has performed the play in the past.
Love Letters relates in epistolary fashion the five-decade correspondence between two sometime lovers. It lends itself to semi-staged readings with actors reading the text with the "letters" in their hands. Actors, famous or not, can rotate in and out quickly with relatively little preparation time, and brief time commitments.
Love Letters opened off-Broadway in 1989 with Kathleen Turner and John Rubinstein, directed by John Tillinger. Christopher Reeve, Marsha Mason, Richard Kiley, Frances Sternhagen, Victor Garber, Dana Ivey and William Hurt were among the actors who rotated in weekly.
Later that year a Broadway production opened, first toplined by Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards. Stockard Channing, Edward Hermann, Swoosie Kurtz, Richard Thomas and Elaine Stritch were among the rotating cast. The play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1990.
In the years since, actors including Elizabeth Taylor, James Earl Jones, Claire Bloom, Jeff Daniels, Sigourney Weaver, Anouk Aimée and Gérard Depardieu (in French), and even Samantha Bee and Jason Jones of The Daily Show have undertaken Love Letters at one time or another on stage or screen. Laura Linney and Stephen Weber starred in a 1999 TV adaptation by Gurney.
The new Broadway revival is produced by a team that includes Nelle Nugent, Fred Zollo and the "James Bond" franchise's Barbara Broccoli.
