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

Meryl Streep as Elizabeth Bishop and Kevin Kline as Robert Lowell were “a dream come true” for Thomas Travisano, the principal editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, upon which Sarah Ruhl’s fine play is based. The Bishop-Lowell letters lend themselves to dramatic adaptation and Ruhl successfully selects and interweaves them in moving epistolary dialogue. Performed online after two years of pandemic restrictions, the Streep-Kline performance about loneliness saved and cultivated by friendship was perfect for cooped-up audiences to view remotely. Streep is probably the best female actor of her generation; Kline is no slouch himself. Many were anticipating this online performance, as was evident from the global enthusiasm expressed in the chat room prior to the production.I thoroughly enjoyed it. Sandra Barry in Nova Scotia said something to me on email in advance that I considered. Would Meryl Streep, an extrovert, be able to capture Bishop’s active shyness? As Bishop writes retrospectively of herself at six-years old in “In the Waiting Room,” published in 1976’s Geography III when she was 65, “I was too shy to stop” (Poems 179). Streep did successfully portray her dynamic introversion and relentless curiosity, as well as reveal Bishop’s lack of confidence through her hesitancy. I think she missed some of Bishop’s down to earth quality though. When we hear Bishop read her own poems, the tone is a bit flat. She underplays herself in her “instinctive, modest, lifelong impersonations of an ordinary woman,” as James Merrill wrote in her obituary; this reserve makes her bold language stand out on its own for readers to enact. Streep’s Bishop sounded a bit snobby—a quality Bishop does have, although usually offset by other tones as in “Filling Station,” which ends with empathy and love.However, in her interaction with Kevin Kline as Robert Lowell, empathy and love shone through full force. Kline was very impressive, too. I quickly forgot he was Kline due to his New England Lowell accent and focused mannerisms. Indeed, everyone I spoke with after the play (Tom Travisano, Neil Besner, David Hoak, Bethany Hicok, my sisters Laura and Amanda, and mother Janet) agreed he made a fantastic Lowell. While Dave Hoak thought Lowell’s arrogance may have been slightly underplayed as Kline’s Lowell was more lovable than the real person, the arrogance still came through for me, especially when he talked about his wives. They are conveyed in the play as somewhat admirable second-class citizens when compared with Lowell’s adoration for Bishop. When Kline-Lowell asked Streep-Bishop, “Will you marry me?”—which is not in Words in Air, therefore a hyperbole of Lowell’s “I assumed that it would be just a matter of time before I proposed” 1957 letter (Words in Air 225)—Streep’s face became a study in frozen shock and panic. Hoak remarked to me that “in hindsight Kline-Lowell’s sexual musings would have seemed more foolish if Streep-Bishop’s constantly moving face had registered less invitation, or perhaps more conflicted invitation. I don’t think either of them ever wanted the other sexually; they were seduced by poetry” (email, June 21, 2021).Kate Whoriskey, directing from Ruhl’s script, successfully made the poetry stand out. Streep’s Bishop was clearly moved by Lowell’s first poem in the play, “Water,” which is the title of the opening act’s first part. Bishop’s poems were read beautifully by Streep. Why though did Ruhl cut much of “The Fish” and “North Haven”? The full movement of these works is unnecessarily sacrificed. Frustrating as well was the end of “One Art” in which Bishop’s key words “(Write it!)” were silently mouthed by Kline. Is it a good idea to have him utter those words? She wrote the poem after all, and when she exclaims “Write it!” at the end, it is the first time in this poem of denial that she acknowledges, with a stutter, that “the art of losing” is “like disaster” (Poems 198). The achievement is hers.Nevertheless, the letters have been selected beautifully in the text of this play. For example, when Bishop moves to Key West, “friends look like luminous frogs” swimming in Hemingway’s pool at night, and Bishop’s hilarious quotation of Dylan Thomas’s “A Truck called Fuck” for Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire displays her humor. Both actors’ expressions were consistently marvelous and multi-faceted. Streep’s ability to register multiple emotions on her face is off the charts. When Lowell tells Bishop that he and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, are going to have a child, we see, in Streep, glimpses of minor shock, bewilderment, digestive process, perhaps slight disgust, and then acceptance and genuine happiness within a span of three seconds. Likewise, when Bishop moves to Maine and tells Lowell about being an orphan, saying “when you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived” Streep’s vulnerability was spellbinding. Why, though, does this line come up twice in the play? There are 800 pages of rich correspondence in Words in Air. This line was also overdone in Bruno Barreto’s film Reaching for the Moon back in 2013. Unlike Barreto’s lush film, though, Ruhl’s play appears to be accurate for the most part. Liberties taken with the letters work effectively most often, as when the playwright splices together sentences of correspondence between Bishop and Lowell beautifully to create crisp dialogue.Also noted twice in the play is Bishop’s tendency to push food away and opt for a bottle of whiskey. Her alcoholism is shown but not overplayed, even if it shocks the audience when the narrator tells us, “she then produces a bottle of rubbing alcohol and takes a sip. [. . .] Elizabeth Bishop throws up.” This extremity of addiction is confirmed in Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau’s Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography from Bishop’s letters to Dr. Anny Baumann (112–113). Her asthma is less successfully conveyed since it is not a factor until near the end when she surprisingly has an attack and melodramatically gasps tearfully on the phone, “You talk—I can’t—.”This occurs in the play’s denouement post-climax of “Art Just Isn’t Worth That Much,” a sentiment Bishop expressed to Lowell following his publication of the 1973 Pulitzer-prize winning The Dolphin, in which the poetry warps his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s pain-ridden letters after their break-up. Despite the overwrought asthma attack, however, the drama was successful in this part of the production, especially when Streep-Bishop says “I re-read The Dolphin many times . . . . I have one tremendous and awful BUT,” and proceeds to quote “dear little Hardy” on “the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that” (Words in Air 707). “Lizzie is not dead [. . .] and you have changed her letters. That is ‘infinite mischief,’ I think [. . .]. One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? [. . .] But art just isn’t worth that much” (708). “It is not being ‘gentle’ to use personal letters that way—it’s cruel.” Streep-Bishop’s rightful chiding of Lowell for his horribly blind appropriation of his ex-wife’s material was plenty painful in its subtle rendering. Bishop clearly “deplore[d]” Lowell’s confessional poetics. As Neil Besner remarked to me, Streep’s acting depicted full understanding of Bishop’s objections to Lowell on aesthetic and ethical grounds. The audience could likely tell that they never completely recovered from this rift, as she would not see him and then he died.Sarah Ruhl has chosen some perfect quotations to embody Lowell’s erratic neediness and Bishop’s empathic love despite all his transgressions. We note his off-kilter quality at the end as he wrongly recounts their first meeting with her “long brown hair,” which shows his “memory failing” as she says while kindly recalling to Lowell that back then he “was also rather dirty, which I liked.”The play’s ending with Bishop reading part of “North Haven” in memoriam of Robert Lowell is accompanied by thousands of letters falling upon them as Bishop and Lowell “un-age somehow” with epistolary echoes—he saying “dearest friend, I miss you so” as she says “I’ll write soon,” and in that last exchange the play encapsulates Lowell’s longing tug on Bishop’s taut wire.Another fine touch in the play’s production was the inclusion of Bishop’s paintings (which can be found in William Benton’s Exchanging Hats), such as “Tombstones for Sale” to introduce her move to Key West, and “Brazilian Landscape” for “Part Three: Brazil and Middle Age,” which is set in the 1950s when Bishop moved in with Lota de Macedo Soares, who built her a studio at Samambaia, making the poet feel as though she had “died and gone to heaven” (One Art 249). “Here I am extremely happy for the first time in my life,” Bishop said.The later painting “Lamp” depicts a lantern on a pulley, which is what Lowell sent Bishop after Lota de Macedo Soares’s “suicide” in 1967. This part was additionally moving, as it followed Streep reading “The Armadillo,” dedicated to Robert Lowell, who always carried it with him, “an example of how a poem should be.” “The Armadillo” follows Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” which she later asks him to dedicate to her. This presumption seemed out of character for the Bishop I know so I checked their correspondence, and she apparently did not ask this favor of him. I can’t see why Ruhl would add this imposition. Langdon Hammer pointed out to me “the status of facts in this play. Fact and fiction are rather mingled [. . .] in the way that Bishop said they shouldn’t be—and how ironic that is, when the play is built out of their letters [. . .]” (June 26, 2021 email).Most often, though, their relationship is depicted accurately with subtle interactive affection, as when Streep-Bishop says to Kline-Lowell, “I think it was extremely sweet of you to give me a witticism in a dream—it shows real, subconscious generosity.” What more could anyone ask for in a friendship? Less appealing but similarly accurate is when in “Interlude: New York” he over-hugs her and the narrator says “a bit of a bear [. . .] they go to their desks, silent.” Then Kline-Lowell, as he tries to overcome this indiscretion compounded upon the marriage proposal, admits “mania,” “myopia,” and “a headless heart.” We see him succeed; Streep nods as he concludes “and of course our friendship really wasn’t a courting [. . .].” Perhaps Lowell overextended the issue somewhat when he acknowledged his love for Elizabeth Hardwick and appreciation for Bishop’s happiness with Lota; this slight hyperbole is the kind of security friends bestow upon each other to move on safely. In the production’s brief intermission, we saw the gorgeous picture of them walking happily together on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.What a beautiful treat all in all. Voice, tone, friendship, reserve, craziness, class, manners, indiscretion, civility, boundaries, and the twentieth century like we’ll never have it again.

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