Spread the Love: Letters by Mrs. Evelyn Merritt

This week on Spread the Love, Lindsay and Craig talk about Letters, a Reader’s Theatre piece by Mrs. Evelyn Merritt.

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Transcript

Welcome to Spread the Love. This week we are talking about Letters by Mrs Evelyn Merritt. Letters is a piece of readers theatre where letters are shared between soldiers and their loved ones from different wars. The characters are from the civil war, WWI and WWII all the way up to the Iraq War. It is a thought provoking look at what people say to each other in times of strife. Craig what do you love about Letters?

Reader’s Theatre is dead-simple to stage. Maybe some chairs for the actors to sit on, maybe some music stands to hold their scripts, but that’s about as complicated as it gets. Now that said, even thought it’s not a full theatrical staging, Letters is still a very moving piece of theatre. You fall in love with the characters. There are awesome moments, there are heart breaking moments and there are hilarious moments, like when a World War I soldier confesses his greatest fear. And I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the Germans, it’s the rats. Lindsay what do you love about Letters?

We don’t have any Readers Theatre in our catalogue and so it’s great to be able to include this piece. It’s interesting, I think this piece might get lost in a traditional play structure – there’s a lot of jumping around between eras. But because it’s just the characters and the words the audience really gets to focus in on what’s being said. The experience becomes intimate. Words resonates. This is a piece about the big picture of war and the much, much smaller picture of a few words on a scrap of paper between two people. And that my friends, that is theatre in a nutshell. That’s it for Spread the Love!