From playwright Sarah Ruhl, Dear Elizabeth is a moving, innovative play based on one of the greatest correspondences in literary history–the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. From 1947 to 1977, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged more than four hundred letters. Describing the writing of their poems, their travel and daily illnesses, the pyrotechnics of their romantic relationships, and the profound affection they had for each other, these missives are the most intimate record available of both poets and one of the greatest correspondences in American literature. As innovative as it is moving, Dear Elizabeth gives voice to a conversation that lived mostly in writing, illuminating some of the finest poems of the twentieth century and the minds that produced them. Featuring Danielle and Michael Henrici as Bishop and Lowell. The play reading will be followed by a talkback with Thomas Travisano, the principal editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, upon which Sarah Ruhl’s fine play is based. Talkback moderated by Robert Huddleston, Professor of Writing at NYU.