I had a sitter for tonight who cancelled Sunday so Kendall and I decided to meet Pam and Deb for dinner and decide if we would go to see the play. It had a disclaimer: Best enjoyed by age 14 and up. By the end of dinner, Kendall decided he wanted to go. When we went to purchase the tickets, he argued with the sales person to be able to get a ticket saying I would explain everything to him so she finally said if your Mom says yes. She also informed me that I had my hands full - so we went.
When I was setting up his book bag for tomorrow I found a very busy picture he drew. One more day of testing and he gets his bike tomorrow :-)
This play is a beautiful, lyrical, intimate, and moving portrait of two acclaimed American poets: Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. In 1947, they began an extraordinary friendship that lasted until Lowell’s death in 1977. Their remarkable and dramatic relationship is chronicled in over 450 letters between them with postmarks from places far and wide – from New York, Maine, Washington DC, and Key West to Italy, Brazil, and London. Their letters captured their incredibly entertaining senses of humor as well as their sublime lyrical sensibilities. In the introduction to Words in Air: The complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, editor Thomas Travisano explains:
“Through wars, revolutions, breakdowns, brief quarrels, failed marriages and love affairs, and intense poetry-writing jags, the letters kept coming. For these were not merely intimate friends, ready to share each other’s lives with all their piquant and painful and funny moments, but eager readers – eager for the next letter, eager for the next poem. For each, personally as well as artistically, these letters became a part of their abidance: a part of that huge block of life they had lived together and apart over thirty years of witty and intimately confiding correspondence.” (Thomas Travisano, ed., Words in Air, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.)
Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award nominee, Sarah Ruhl, uses the text of these stylistically brilliant, revealing, witty, incisive, and often times very funny letters, to create her own theatrical poetry tribute to a kind of love rarely explored - strong tethered friendship. In this production, Bishop and Lowell are portrayed by Ellen McLaughlin and Rinde Eckert, award-winning theatre veterans and real-life husband and wife.
Ten years after their first meeting, Lowell confessed in one of the correspondence’s most moving letters, “Asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.” Kendall, don't have a might have been. I can tell you I do not have a might have been but I may be a might have been for someone else. And someday I will tell you about my Dear Elizabeth letters...
Ten years after their first meeting, Lowell confessed in one of the correspondence’s most moving letters, “Asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.” Kendall, don't have a might have been. I can tell you I do not have a might have been but I may be a might have been for someone else. And someday I will tell you about my Dear Elizabeth letters...
Buenas noches!
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