letter writing in this tech-crazy world is now a dying art of some very personal conversations. lee-Alison and George Sibley took us through a saga of two friends during their performance of AR Gurney’s love letters at the American Centre. By Rupinder Kaur
It is not easy to define Andrew Makepeace ladd III and Melissa Gardner’s intricately woven relationship through their 50 years of correspondence. They had known each other since the age of six when they met at Melissa’s birthday party, whereafter she wrote to him thanking him for the present, which was the book titled The lost Princess of Oz.
He wrote back saying the reason he gifted her that book was because Melissa “looked like a lost princess” when she had entered the classroom once. They exchanged more letters, picture postcards, notes passed in the classroom, RSVPs, et al as they went to different boarding schools, summer camps, colleges and a number of phases and places in life.
As a young lad stiffened by his family’s expectations, Andrew had his head set on creating and living the ideal life while Melissa defied the rules to live life dictated by no other authority. They acknowledged their attraction towards each other and even their families in the beginning wanted their union but they went in different directions while keeping each other informed of each and every aspect of their lives.
Taking us through their bittersweet journey were George Sibley, Minister-Counselor for Economic, Environment, Science and Technology Affairs at the US Embassy and actress lee-Alison, his wife, during their performance of American playwright AR Gurney’s Pulitzer-nominated play love letters at the American Centre.
The epistolary play was also adapted in Hindi by Javed Siddiqui in 1992 and performed by late actor Farooq Sheikh and Shabana Azmi. They together performed 500 shows worldwide including a final grand performance held inside the Taj Mahal in 2013 before Farooq’s demise.
The stage was set with a desk and two chairs as the only props. There was no background score, no memorisation of lines but only two actors, haloed by the glow of the stage lights, reading out from a binder. The Sibley’s have been active theatre actors for long now and also met on stage for the first time.
lee-Alison told us, “We met 30 years ago as leading man and leading lady in a musical called Pippin. We’ve been very lucky to have performed during his Foreign Service career from time to time. When he became more senior, we didn’t perform a lot together though I’ve been very active. But even before we met, we trained for the stage and both performed since we were children.”
George said that over the years as his career moved forward he could hardly invest time in theatre. “I love theatre and I’ve missed it very much. When I was younger, I studied at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York. love letters is a play I know very well and since the structure of the play is letters, I’ve been able to make the time to do it and I also get to do it with the love of my life,” he said.
like Andrew, who we learnt during the play was shipped off to various locations during his stint with the American Navy, George, too, was a Merchant seaman for 11 years before becoming a diplomat.
“letters were a very important part of our relationship especially in the beginning because after we first met at the show, he went back to sea. He was gone for many months so we wrote back and forth. I still have stacks and stacks of his letters which I saved and those letters are fraught with a lot of emotions. At times when I read those letters I’m very amazed and say to myself that we were very young. We were the same people but in a sense we were very different people. It’s interesting to go back and read those letters. We are doing this play to see the development of the characters over the years,” lee-Alison shared.
Getting into character can take an actor through a roller-coaster ride of emotions and at times can be tedious as well. “A part of being an actor is being open to adopting that role, that persona and part of it is the skill of the playwright to give you that character you can slip into but that’s what an actor does,” George told us.
The Sibley’s never had a go at writing a play but lee-Alison, who is also a theatre teacher, has directed many. “I taught theatre in Kolkata. I gave a course in Jadavpur University. I also directed a couple of pieces and performed. I did love letters, too, not with George but with another professional actor,” she said.