Everlasting Love

Adrian Hall and Katerine Helmond, together again

by Johnette Rodriguez

Adrian Hall

As playwright A.R. Gurney tells it, he wrote Love Letters as a finger exercise to teach himself the computer back in the late '80s. But when he experienced the response of the audience to a reading he did with Holland Taylor at the New York Public Library, he quickly realized that this two-person play had taken on a life of its own. Since its first professional production in 1988, dozens of actors have performed it in New York and scores more around the country, including two who are very familiar to Rhode Island audiences: Adrian Hall and Katherine Helmond.

Native Texans Hall and Helmond have done Love Letters twice: at the University of Texas and at Galveston's Little Theater. Now these lifelong friends are bringing the piece about lifelong friends to Rhode Island College, for three performances on September 23 and 24.

Hall first met Helmond when he went to Galveston to teach, and she was still in high school. He particularly remembers casting her in Our Town and in The Children's Hour.

"Those were wonderful times," Hall recalls warmly. "We loved working together. She was so committed and determined to be in the theater."

Helmond, for her part, remembers Hall "as the person who told me I should be an actress. I was fooling around with theater in high school. I had only viewed it as something fun to do. He explained to me that I could do this professionally."

Thus, throughout the '50s and early '60s, Helmond worked with Hall whenever she could, primarily with Hall directing and Helmond acting. For one memorable production of Gigi, however, at the Playhouse Theatre in Houston, Hall played Gaston to Helmond's Gigi. From Texas, they individually made the big move to New York, where they often joined forces, and from there, Hall came to Providence to form Trinity Repertory Company, where he remained for its first 25 years. Helmond became a member of the company from 1965 to 1969.

"I just pulled her in on everything I did," Hall remembers, with a laugh. "She was so willing to take chances and just jump right off the cliff with me."

And jump they did. Hall began the kind of collaborative playwrighting that would come to be called "the Trinity style": "I used to find bits and pieces of things and then, with the company, I would put it together. Quite often, it was enormously successful, and it was always controversial."

The success of Trinity's 1968 production of Norman Holland's Years of the Locust -- which dealt with Oscar Wilde's experiences in Reading Gaol -- prompted an invitation to the Edinburgh International Festival, an adventure that Hall and Helmond credit as one of the most important things they shared professionally.

"It was such a sense of accomplishment when Trinity was invited to Edinburgh," Helmond explains. "No American company had ever been invited, and it turned out that the show was the hit of the festival."

The following year, Helmond left for the original production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves for which she received great reviews. Shortly thereafter, she found national attention in the TV series Soap and Who's the Boss?, and in films such as Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But though she and Hall went their separate career paths and have lived and worked on opposite sides of the country for the past 20 years, they have stayed very close friends.

"We're both Texans, both from working-class backgrounds," Helmond reflects. "I knew his family, he knew mine. He was the nearest thing I ever had to a brother."

"Had we not been in the same profession," Hall notes, "we might not have stayed laced together so tightly all of our lives. But that history gives you something so rooted."

"Every time one of us was needed, when the telephone call came," Helmond emphasizes, "we have shown up and been there for whatever needed to be done."

Katherine Helmond

"Katherine has always been there for me, and I have tried to be there for her," concurs Hall. "Sometimes we find ourselves in La-La land, such as when I was in Hollywood to direct Quills at the Geffen Playhouse. She just came up to me in the lobby and said, `Don't bother about me, you have many more important people to talk to.' But she was there."

When the opportunity to do Love Letters with Helmond first came up, Hall had reservations -- "I can't act, I don't act, I have no aspirations to act." But Helmond understood some of his anxieties and had a script of the play printed in large type, and she marked the places she thought might give him pause. "She knows there are certain things I've never paid much attention to, like proper diction and pronunciation," says Hall.

So two years ago, they found themselves backstage again for the first time in many years, and the Texas audiences loved it. When Charlton Heston and his wife were in Dallas recently with Love Letters and received terrible reviews, Hall called Helmond in trepidation, and she said, "Don't worry, it's not anything like the way we do it."

Although Hall doesn't consider himself remotely connected to Gurney's Andrew Makepeace Ladd III -- "he's a stiff, pompous kind of fellow, and I'm not Dick Jenkins; I can't just put on a gray suit and become that person" -- there is a very personal connection when he and Helmond read together.

Helmond agrees that "the character Adrian is taking on is diametrically opposed to anything in his life." And though the privileged background of Helmond's character, Melissa Gardner, is not like Helmond's, Melissa's sense of taking a chance to go off in a different direction from her family feels familiar to her.

"I identify with the relationship that goes on over the years, from the time they were little kids until they are older," Helmond states. "When you have a long-term friendship, you share the changes, the growth. As we both survive through life, an admiration is gained, even if one has differences of opinion. There's an attachment that goes through all the years. There's great respect between us, and we both have a great sense of humor, which helps to get you past the bumpy parts."

Next January, the 72-year-old Hall begins a new three-year project with the University of Delaware, in which he will spend two to three weeks each year guiding students through the process of putting together a piece, "in the Trinity style," about contemporary society. Helmond just finished an episode of Strong Medicine, a TV series about women doctors; she's in the process of setting up a lecture tour in New York; she flies to South Dakota this fall to film Marriage Clause, a TV movie-of-the-week; and then she will be back in Los Angeles to perform a brand-new five-person play by Gurney, titled Ancestral Voices.

But for now, she's looking forward to seeing old friends and colleagues in Providence, as is Hall, although he confesses nervously, "It's rather scary doing Love Letters in Providence. I just have so many good friends and acquaintances there. I would hate to embarrass them."

Love Letters will be performed on Saturday, September 23 at 8 p.m. and on Sunday, September 24 at 2 and 7:30 p.m. at Rhode Island College's Lila & John Sapinsley Hall at the Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts, 600 Mt. Pleasant Street, Providence. Call 456-8144.