"Love Letters" recently opened a stint at a Las Vegas casino, so one may wonder whether A.R. Gurney's play, like Wayne Newton and Robert Goulet, has already moved into the realm of self-parody.
But that hasn't stopped Chicago actor George Brant, who has written an amusing, if overlong, send-up called "Lovely Letters," now splitting a double bill with Jill Cargerman's "The Smell of Ennui" at Theatre/Theater.
In Gurney's unabashedly sentimental drama, a wealthy scion and the neurotic girl-next-door sit and read aloud from a lifetime of correspondence that etches their attenuated relationship. Brant's parody finds a pair of similarly well-heeled pen pals exchanging petty and vicious personal attacks, beginning with a dispute over a bag of stale snack chips.
Brant has a winningly low-key sense of humor (his characters hail from a burg called Plowtown) and his performance as the pompous Richard Johnson makes a nice counterpoint to Adrienne Corcoran's smarmy Jane Pennington. But the play still feels like a 10-minute sketch inflated, for no very good reason, into a 45-minute one-act.
