Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Letters to Joan
Finding Forests
Venue: Mint Studio at Greenside @ George Street
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Samantha Streit, the writer of Letters to Joan has come to interrogate her Grandpa Lenny to share his stories, and she gets more out of him than he is at first willing to divulge. She does this with a motive, her question: Am I like grandma Joan, will I fail if I write this play about her?
Review
From the start the audience is in the presence of an intense young playwright, Sam, (Samantha Streit. Her outfit, her hair, everything about her says here’s a bright young thing, eager and ready to learn, to share. Sam has discovered something exciting, love letters between her grandparents and these have become her obsession, her project. Much like her grandmother Joan before her, Sam is a playwright.
Full of verve and enthusiasm, Sam quotes from the letters, a young romance. Joan is a woman who loves so deeply that she can hardly contain herself, the man in question lives far away. And then, unexpectedly and just right, Sam is joined in an American Diner by her grandfather Lenny, beautifully performed by a proper old fashioned American gentleman (Kevin Cahill). It is great to see a very elderly man and a young woman on stage together in a modern play, we are so used to seeing them only in Shakespeare or Chekhov.
Their conversation, their voices, blend in a classic granddaughter-grandpa relationship; hhe wants to talk about the newspaper, his favourite food at the diner, her youth – “You were spoilt, Samantha”, while she wants to interrogate him about the past. She puts him on the spot, and here we meet the intense young playwright searching for her subject, the theme of her next play, and she is already in it, it is happening now and being developed at the same time.
In the low burble of the diner all around them, Lenny and Sam try to make sense of the past. They don cardigans, glasses, become the people they talk about. There is a palpable intensity in their depiction of the whirlwind romance, the lies Lenny told that Kevin acts out in a deep moment of youthful embarrassed truthfulness. Sam as the depressed Joan standing stock still, not engaging, while Lenny pleads to her, and later, very effectively, we witness the echo of this scene when Lenny is gone “I am dead, Sam!” and she, Sam, pleads for the truth and understanding with tears in her eyes.
How beautiful for Sam to be able to perform her own story and to invite us to watch how it is created at the same time! The whole life of Sam’s grandparents plays out before us. Lenny’s touchingly difficult youth in great poverty, Joan’s dreams and their destruction, her descent into a psychotic kind of madness that Sam shows us just by acting while quoting from her letters. The stage becomes more and more cluttered as their life and Sam’s project become more complicated, the visual metaphor for Joan’s depression and the difficulty of writing a play apparent in strewn papers, nervously moved chairs, Sam moving restlessly about, sitting, lying on the table, nowhere to rest. Words are emphasised by the clacking of keys on an old fashioned typewriter. Writing is hard work! Yes it is Sam, keep going, don’t let anyone, nor convention stop you, much like Joan’s multitude of letters, keep them flowing.
Grandparents often want to tell the new generations about what happened in their life, but they don’t necessarily want to talk about the difficult bits. It is Sam’s skill as a playwright to show us a young person who not only allows her grandpa to share his stories but gets more out of him than he is at first willing to divulge. She does this with a motive, her question: Am I like Joan, will I fail, let me write this play about it, but can I? Director Martavius Parrish has helped create an intense event which touches the audience deeply in such an intimate space. I would have loved to see some more realistic looking 1950s style letters to match the old typewriter, perhaps a bundle of them as a prop. Overall, all this comes together in a excellent show at the Fringe.
