The Personal and The Poetical

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Paul Ruffolo

Carrie Hitchcock as Elizabeth Bishop and Norman Moses as Robert Lowell

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Dear Elizabeth explores that least understood and most necessary of human relationships, friendship. Sarah Ruhl’s play, adapted from Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, centers on the relationship between two giants of 20th-century American poetry with courage and depth. Over the course of a correspondence spanning from 1947-77 with occasional in-person visits, Bishop and Lowell dealt with everything from substance abuse and mental health issues to their tumultuous love lives and the honing of their shared craft. 

Under Marie Kohler’s direction, Carrie Hitchcock and Norman Moses embody their characters with profound success. With a masterful Massachusetts dialect, Hitchcock conveys Bishop’s genteel restraint and quiet fortitude with aplomb. Her facial reactions during Lowell’s mental health descents and recurring romantic pursuit of her (never fruitful) are subtle and marvelously evocative. Moses realizes Hitchcock’s perfect foil—affable, eloquent and given to manic episodes brought on by bipolar disorder—with similar skill. The interplay between this married pair of performers is nuanced and natural, a joy to behold throughout.

The two play on a gorgeous set designed by Steve Barnes. Two studio spaces evoke the poets’ separate abodes, while a shallow pool of water wraps around the playing area, bringing whimsy and sensory depth to the two New Englanders’ affinity for the sea. Joe Cerqua’s score—compelling, slightly melancholy chamber music—likewise adds much to the sense of the poets’ lives and friendship. 

The script does not answer every question it raises, but perhaps this is apropos for a piece drawn from real interaction. Lowell, in a rare moment of utter humility, laments “all the rawness of learning” at his age, while simultaneously praising writing as an outlet offering him purpose and direction. Bishop, self-described as “the loneliest person who ever lived,” placed a high premium on the written word for organizing her experience of a capricious world. Similarly, there is seldom a neat beginning and ending to friendship and the ambiguity and ongoing repartee between two very different souls committed to one another for a long period of time is an exemplar for the human condition itself. 

Through Oct. 18 at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Studio Theater, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, call 414-291-7800 or visit milwaukeechambertheatre.com.