Love Letters is a Pulitzer Prize for Drama nominated play by A. R. Gurney. The play centers on just two characters, Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III.
They sit side by side at tables and read the notes, letters and cards - in which over nearly 50 years, they discuss their hopes and ambitions, dreams and disappointments, victories and defeats - that have passed between them throughout their separated lives.
Melissa is portrayed as rich, spoiled, with a private nurse and private schools, artistic, certainly lascivious, divorced, eventually alcoholic, bi-polar, and suicidal. She hates writing "these goddamned letters" while Andy Ladd is square, destined for Yale, a naval officer, a lawyer, and a U.S. Senator, and says that "writing letters is what he loves most".
In his preface to Love Letters, A. R. Gurney suggests that his emphasis in this play on the importance of writing is more than coincidental. Many in the audience leave a powerful Love Letters performance with a tear on their cheeks.