Read to Me

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I am a snail mailer. Always have been. Growing up at the Red Doors Motel in New Hampshire, I befriended girls my age playing in the pool, or at the shuffle board, or during croquet games on the front lawn. Sometimes we became penpals. Letter writing has been a feature of my world, and a correspondence with Marty Braun changed my life.

So when Brendan Pelsue’s brilliant script, Read to Me, came along, I was more than ready to tackle the magical realism of letters falling from the sky.

The story takes place in a children’s hospital and centers around a young boy, Tony, who is terminally ill. His reading tutor, Lawrence, happens to have some mail on hand, and Tony is incredulous that letters somehow get around the world via a mysterious postal service. He doesn’t believe it. Lawrence gets Tony to write some letters to random people found in the phone book, and the drama begins.

My sketches all involve Tony in various compositions in his hospital bed. My first idea included the nurse and a male figure, which could be his tutor or his father.

Portland Stage’s Creative Director, Anita Stewart, suggested Tony on a mountain of mail. I liked this one, with the letters suggesting clouds of blue sky possibility for a boy short on time.

All of my other ideas were really variations on this theme.

One of the recipients of Tony’s letter gives him a diving helmet. It plays a meaningful role at the end, and perhaps gives away too much, but I couldn’t resist drawing him floating among the letters.

The stage direction included Lawrence clipping letters to a line. While having the title double as letters, it doesn’t really suggest the potent relationships that form between the players.

How about letters and happy clouds literally holding up a sick boy?

Anita’s suggestion made the cut. I was told not to make it look too much like a children’s book, so I gave the setting some contrast, with a dark sky and stars out of which falls the letter.

I began working on the hand-lettering and found an envelope and stamp to add substance.

This was altered digitally to suggest a bit of dimension in the final poster, and the drawing was cropped a bit, to not be quite so centered.

We saw the show during it’s final weekend in early November, and I brought along that envelope.

My friend, Peg, had seen the staged reading of Read to Me in May during Portland Stage’s Little Festival of the Unexpected. She and her husband, Art, came along for the full production.

The performances were all incredible, particularly Lawrence, played by Esau Mora, and young Tony, played by Lukis Crowell, a local middle school student. Again, the dialogue is deftly written and authentically played. It’s a heart-breaker in the end, but one filled with tender beauty. The set design by Anita Stewart was simple yet stunning, and allowed for cosmic travels of the heart and mind.

Kudos to Portland Stage for staging the world premiere of a tricky subject, death. The play confirmed my deepest belief that letters can make a difference.

I feel fortunate to have friends who feel the same. Dan, for instance, has been corresponding with me since I lived around the block from him in Jamaica Plain, MA in the 80’s. I save every one of his thoughtfully decorated works of art.

Since moving to Maine and meeting the illustrious Mary Anne Lloyd, I count her as an esteemed correspondent, whose hand-lettering prowess was most recently featured in my favorite magazine, Uppercase.

Thanks to instagram, I met a new penpal, Petronella Periwinkle, (not her real name) whose recent missive was like a Christmas party in an envelope, complete with an illustrated zine, candy, postcards, and a treasure chest of fairy tale stamps!

Certainly the holiday season is a significant time to send greetings. My last post detailed the process behind my holiday card illustration, but the motive behind sending out cards is what makes the season tick for me. Many of my cards go to people I’ve not seen in years, thanks to geography, but it’s important to me to touch base. Every year there are a few who move out of my orbit or pass on entirely. Wendy, a recent recipient of my card wrote back online, “I feel blessed by the contents of one small envelope.” That’s really the magic of mail, to stay tethered to each other in this chaotic world. Happy holidays, everyone!