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    Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again
    Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again
    Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again
    Ebook85 pages1 hour

    Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again

    By Sarah Ruhl

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    About this ebook

    From playwright Sarah Ruhl, Dear Elizabeth is a moving, innovative play based on one of the greatest correspondences in literary history--the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

    From 1947 to 1977, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged more than four hundred letters. Describing the writing of their poems, their travel and daily illnesses, the pyrotechnics of their romantic relationships, and the profound affection they had for each other, these missives are the most intimate record available of both poets and one of the greatest correspondences in American literature.

    The playwright Sarah Ruhl fell in love with these letters and set herself an unusual challenge: to turn this thirty-year exchange into a stage play, and to bring to life the friendship of two writers who were rarely even in the same country. As innovative as it is moving, Dear Elizabeth gives voice to a conversation that lived mostly in writing, illuminating some of the finest poems of the twentieth century and the minds that produced them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 2, 2014
    ISBN9780374711986
    Author

    Sarah Ruhl

    Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, essayist, and poet. Her fifteen plays include In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), The Clean House, and Eurydice. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee, and the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Her plays have been produced on- and off-Broadway, around the country, internationally, and have been translated into many languages. Her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other books include Letters from Max, with Max Ritvo, and 44 Poems for You. She has received the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Samuel French Award, the Feminist Press Under 40 Award, the National Theater Conference Person of the Year Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Whiting Award, a Lily Award, and a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for mid-career playwrights. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tony Charuvastra, who is a child psychiatrist, and their three children. You can read more about her work at SarahRuhlPlaywright.com.

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    • 5/5
      Sarah Ruhl has taken two extremely talented poets and their unique friendship and turned it into a beautiful yet strong text. the minimal spine that she has built for the construction is delicious. made me want to put this piece onto the stage

    Book preview

    Dear Elizabeth - Sarah Ruhl

    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    For Elizabeth B and Elizabeth C as in Charuvastra who covered her typewriter with bandages and typed out all the poetry she could remember when she was far from home

    Sometimes it seems … as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.

    —Elizabeth Bishop, from her notebook

    Dream—

    I see a postman everywhere

    Vanishing in thin blue air,

    A mammoth letter in his hand,

    Postmarked from a foreign land.

    The postman’s uniform is blue.

    The letter is of course from you

    And I’d be able to read, I hope,

    My own name on the envelope

    But he has trouble with this letter

    Which constantly grows bigger & bigger

    And over and over with a stare,

    He vanishes in blue, blue air.

    —Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

    Elizabeth told me about Robert Lowell. She said, He’s my best friend. When I met him a few years later, I mentioned that I knew her and he said, Oh, she’s my best friend. It was nice to think that she and Lowell both thought of each other in the same way.

    —Thom Gunn, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop

    I can remember Cal’s carrying Elizabeth’s Armadillo poem around in his wallet everywhere, not the way you’d carry the picture of a grandson, but as you’d carry something to brace you and make you sure of how a poem ought to be.

    —Richard Wilbur, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop

    While we were with her, she managed to finish North Haven, the poem [or elegy] for Lowell. She read it to us and walked about with it in her hand. I found it very moving that she felt she could hardly bear to put it down, that it was part of her. She put it beside her plate at dinner.

    —Ilse Barker, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop

    Contents

    Title Page

    Copyright Notice

    Dedication

    Epigraphs

    Preface

    DEAR ELIZABETH

    ACT ONE

    Part One: Water

    Part Two: Come to Yaddo

    Part Three: Brazil

    ACT TWO

    Part One: Skunk

    Part Two: Art just isn’t worth that much

    Afterword

    Acknowledgments

    Also by Sarah Ruhl

    A Note About the Author

    Copyright

    Preface

    The great poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were great friends, and they wrote more than eight hundred pages of letters to each other. When I was on bed rest, pregnant with twins, a friend gave me the book of their collected letters, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I already had a long-standing obsession with Bishop; my obsession with Lowell and his friendship with Bishop now began. I could not put the letters down. I hungered to hear them read aloud; I particularly longed to hear letter number 161 read out loud. Number 161 is Lowell’s most confessional letter to Bishop, and I think, one of the most beautiful love letters ever written. In it, he says, about not asking Bishop to marry him: "But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had."

    Reading these eight hundred pages—these strands of two lives intersecting, rarely meeting—I thought: Why do I find this narrative so compelling, even though theirs is not a story in the traditional sense? I was desperate to know how the story would come out—how each life would progress, how the relationship would end. But I also loved how the letters resisted a sense of the usual literary story—how instead they forced us to look at life as it is lived. Not neat. Not two glorious Greek arcs meeting in the center. Instead: a dialectic between the interior poetic life and the pear-shaped, particular, sudden, ordinary life-as-it-is-lived.

    Life intrudes, without warning. Bishop’s great love and partner, Lota, commits suicide without warning. Bishop has multiple asthma attacks, and often needs

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