Perfectly timed for lovers young and old this Valentine’s Day, the Appalachian Theatre of the High Country (ATHC) is hosting a locally produced stage reading of the award-winning play “Love Letters” for a single performance at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, February 14 at the Art Deco landmark in Boone. Tickets are affordably-priced at $15 each with reserved seating available for general public purchase beginning Wednesday, January 29th.

The production was runner-up for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and chronicles a fifty year relationship that took place from 1937 to 1987. The play stars local actors Dr. Gina L. Grandi and Dr. Derek Davidson, both of whom are faculty members in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Appalachian State University. The play is directed by Keith Martin, Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the university, who also serves as vice chair of the App Theatre’s Board of Trustees.

In this wry and poignant tale told entirely through a half-century of letters, playwright A. R. Gurney has created “an exquisite jewel of a play, “one of the four or five best American plays of the decade,” said Time magazine.  

From their first scrawled valentines of childhood to the last guilty goodbye, the letters exchanged between Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III envelop us in a unique nostalgia. While the images they create bring back youth’s universal innocence, fears and fancies, they further reveal themselves, their goals and their dreams of a “love affair” that takes them from grade school through middle age.

As they ponder opportunity lost and love squandered, we see the very essence of their life long relationship… all in the letters that were at its very root.

“Love Letters” is produced by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

CBS This Morning looks at the art of writing love letters. In 2016, Serena Altschul sat down with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal, the "Love Story" costars who appeared on stage in "Love Letters."