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As live theater prepares to make its grand reentrance in the months to come, the stopgap phenomenon of virtual theater is gently fading into the background. This week features the final edition of Spotlight on Plays, a streaming series offered by Broadway's Best Shows, which since last May has offered star-studded readings of works by major playwrights to raise money for the Actors Fund. On Thursday, June 17, the series concludes with a high-toned flourish: two of America' greatest actors, Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, in Sarah Ruhl's literary 2012 two-hander Dear Elizabeth.
Streep and Kline have worked together before, of course, both on screen (in films including Sophie's Choice and Ricki and the Flash) and on stage (in the Public Theater's outdoor productions of The Seagull and Mother Courage). In the epistolary play Dear Elizabeth, they costar as the 20th-century American poets and friends Elisabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Best known for such works as The Clean House, Stage Kiss and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), Ruhl has fashioned the script out of selections from the poets' real-life correspondence and verse from the 1940s through the 1970s. Kate Whoriskey, who directed the play's 2015 Off Broadway premiere, returns to helm this virtual version, with Polly Noonan reading the stage directions.
Dear Elizabeth premieres on Thursday, June 17, at 8pm ET. Tickets cost $19 and can be purchased via Stellar here; in addition to the Actors Fund, proceeds benefit the Acting Company, a repertory theater group of which Kline is one of many notable alums. The performance will remain viewable on demand through 6pm ET on Monday, June 21.