Think of the friends you have had the longest, who are still in your life today. The more experience I get, the higher the value of those long-term chosen family. The familiar scout song tells us new friends are silver, long-term gold and as many of us advance to golden years while our hair gradually highlights to silver, a story like Pen Pals has even more weight. Happy hug, weighted blanket comfort weight and heart pangs of love and loss await you. Bring in a few of those takeout napkins from your car or a packet of hankies, just in case something gets in your eye.
Michael Griffo has essentially set a diamond relationship in a platinum setting. Bernie (Nancy McKeon) and Mags (Gail Winar) are thrust together by fate when Bernie’s school assignment is to pull a name from a hat to start writing to a new friend. You remember letter writing, don’t you? How fun it was to try to write longhand across a page, neatly and keeping the lines in order. It was always my fondest hope to get letters, though it was difficult to sit down and write one. Ah, but how important those letters are when you consider the love and longing and life limned in them.
Bernie confers the nickname “Mags” and the hopes, love, trials and tribulations are shared within this magic circle of two young woman, over thousands of miles of ocean. Michael Griffo has adapted a true story and while our lettered generations (Gen Y and Z, I’m talking to you) will view this as history, it is our-story for the Boomers, Gen Jones and even Gen X can remember the thrill of reading and writing something that took days to reach you. Patience really is a virtue.
Ms. McKeon and Ms. Winar interact as true friends, and that is only one of the many gifts they give. When the women first meet, they are teenagers and both transform into energetic teens with all the hopes and concerns that plague us in those years. We experience historic events through their letters and their eloquent reactions and while an epistolary style might seem pedestrian in other hands, SuzAnne Barabas transforms this on-book work into an illuminated Renaissance manuscript. Jessica Parks’ sets are always glorious and both settings are breathtaking in their detail. David Woolard’s costumes capture each woman’s style and Jill Nagle’s Lighting with Nick Simone’s sound completes the dream. Performed in the flexible and intimate space, I felt like I was listening to cherished friends and an eyeblink later, I was still hungry for more. Got friends? See. This. Show. (WITH them).
Imagine, more than 150 world premieres for New Jersey Repertory Company, this is the most recent with even more to come. Get your tickets here: https://njrep.org/show/__penpals/ . You only have through October 20 to see this gem, make your reservations now time waits for no one.