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. “Ruhl's gentle treatment of the poems, the way she finds the breathing space between life and art, can't be overpraised. She crystallizes the magic of what is left unsaid and the piercing intimacy of regret in one beguiling passage after another.” ― Karen D'Souza, San Jose Mercury News “Ruhl delicately explores, through nothing more than the letters and her own theatrical imagination, the solitude of the artist, the exactitude of the writer's craft, the balance between confession and privacy and, in the end, why poetry matters.” ― Frank Rizzo, Variety “ Dear Elizabeth mesmerizes in every way. An articulate, imaginative, and moving theatrical experience. . . . uniquely its own engaging creation. In an age of mutilated language and truncated texts, such a play commands every ounce of our attention.” ― E. Kyle Minor, New Haven Register “Watching poets, even eminent poets, read and write to each other shouldn't be half as gripping as playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Les Waters make it in Dear Elizabeth .” ― Robert Hurwitt, SFGate “Playwright Sarah Ruhl and her director and frequent collaborator Les Waters have re-set the rules and raised the bar for epistolary theatre in their bracing, moving and theatrically exciting production.” ― Andrew Beck, Hartford Examiner “Riveting. A moving, funny, and highly theatrical experience.” ― Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post Sarah Ruhl 's plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play, a cycle (PEN American Award); Dead Man's Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); and Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth . She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN Center Award for a midcareer playwright, the Feminist Press's Forty Under Forty Award, and the 2010 Lilly Award . She is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. Dear Elizabeth A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again By Sarah Ruhl Farrar, Straus and Giroux Copyright © 2014 Sarah Ruhl All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-86547-815-2 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, CHAPTER 1 ACT ONE Part One: Water Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell enter and sit at a table. A SUBTITLE FLASHES: May 12, 1947. BISHOP Dear Mr. Lowell, I just wanted to say that I think it is wonderful you have received all the awards; the Guggenheim, the Pulitzer, and — I guess I'll just call them 1, 2, & 3 ... Maybe if you're still in town you would come to see me sometime, I should like to see you very much, or just write me a note if you'd rather ... Elizabeth Bishop LOWELL Dear Miss Bishop, Sorry to have missed dining with you yesterday, and reading with you. You are a marvelous writer, and your note was about the only one that meant anything to me. Last night at three we had a fire. The man who started it fell asleep drunk and smoking. He ran back and forth from his room to the bathroom carrying a waste-basket with a thimble-full of water shouting at the top of his lungs, "Shush, shush, no fire. Stop shouting you'll wake everyone up. An accident. Nobody injured," until a policeman shouted: "Nobody injured? Look at all the people you've gotten up." Today my room smells like burnt tar-paper. I'm going to Boston on the 2nd and then to Yaddo. I hope that I will see more of you some day. Robert Lowell BISHOP Dear Robert, (I've never been able to catch that name they call you but Mr. Lowell doesn't so