Glen Arbor Players open 2026 season
From staff reports
The Glen Arbor Players open their 2026 season at The Leelanau School auditorium on Friday, May 22, at 7 pm with the play Love Letters by A.R. Gurney. This Pulitzer Prize-nominated play tracks, through letters, the lifelong friendship between characters Andy Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner. The play, directed by GAP veteran Teddy House, celebrates the joys, trials, triumphs and heartbreaks of their lives.
Both characters in this touching, often funny, play are from affluent East Coast families. Melissa is an artist whose family turmoil has left her struggling to find a solid center. Andy, on the other hand, is from a stable home and follows a traditional life path of marriage, family, and established career. Although their lives go in very different directions, their bond of friendship, and sometimes romance, remains.
Gurney was already a well-established playwright when he wrote Love Letters in the late 1980s. The play came into being almost by accident. According to Gurney, the project started as just a typing exercise to help him learn his new computer. He then thought it might make a good short story and sent it to the New Yorker magazine. They rejected it, saying it read too much like a play, and so, a play it became!
Love Letters has often been used as a “star vehicle,” pairing well-known actors such as the original 1989 cast of Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards. Other famous duos include Stockard Channing and John Rubenstein, Timothy Hutton and Elizabeth McGovern, Swoosie Kurtz and Richard Thomas, Carol Burnett and Brian Dennehy, and Alan Alda and Candice Bergen. The list goes on and on. Love Letters has also become a staple at regional and community theaters over the decades.
House says she has long wanted to direct Love Letters for GAP audiences, and she is putting her own touch on this production. The play is usually presented as a formal, staged reading with actors sitting still, side by side, reading their letters. This approach is what Gurney prescribed, but House wants this production to feel more intimate and emotionally immediate for the audience and so has directed the actors “to move naturally through their memories and letters.” Without losing the simplicity and elegance of Gurney’s play, the cast, featuring Janet Stipicevich and Harold Kranick, creates a production that feels warm, human, and deeply personal.
House encourages all to see Love Letters. “I truly believe audiences will laugh, reflect, and perhaps even shed a tear or two as they follow Melissa and Andy through decades of friendship, love, loss, and connection.”
There will be 6 performances of Love Letters at The Leelanau School Auditorium, 1 Old Homestead Rd, Glen Arbor:
Friday and Saturday, May 22 & 23 at 7 pm
Sunday, May 24 at 2 pm
Friday and Saturday May 29 & 30 at 7 pm
Sunday, May 31 at 2 pm
No tickets are required. A minimum $10 donation is appreciated.
