The Letters

Writers’ Theatre, Glencoe, Ill.

(847) 242-6000

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“Here is a Cold War fueled by that most heated of emotions—absolute fear,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. John W. Lowell’s 75-minute play turns a short office meeting between two co-workers into “a dramatic stranglehold of an encounter” by setting it in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, where privacy and freedom of expression have virtually no place. Even though Anna (Kate Fry), an editor for a government publisher, is a loyal Communist who’s been dutifully redacting the “pornographic” passages in a famous composer’s diary, she is not immune to suspicion. “Apparently someone has made a personal copy of the diary,” and the office’s director (Mark L. Montgomery) has launched an investigation that, for Anna, becomes highly personal. Every seemingly innocuous question that the boss asks is a potential trap, and every carefully worded response “can be twisted into an indictment” that could land Anna in the gulag.

The result is “a rather smart and sexy thriller,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Fry, an actress who, “to my mind, can compete with the Hollywood best of ’em,” makes Anna’s every thought process crystal clear. Because the young apparatchik is focused on self-preservation, she actually has “very little to say,” but “Fry’s face registers everything from ignorance to fear, defiance to raw terror.” Montgomery, by contrast, keeps you guessing. It could be that the director is conducting an official government interrogation or that he’s abusing his position to take sexual advantage of Anna. He might just be “looking for a confidante, or a mother confessor.” As the story “twists in deliciously serpentine fashion,” the audience can never quite be sure.