Love Letters

By William Tynan

What a pity that some of the best acting onstage today is going to be seen by so few people. And that such performances are in the service of so slender a vehicle as Vita & Virginia, now installed in off-Broadway's Union Square Theatre for an 18-week run. Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins bring to roaring life the two-character play created by Atkins from the letters Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf exchanged during their 18-year relationship. If their love affair (mostly of the heart and soul) was passionate, it was not very interesting -- at least not in this telling.

The two met in 1922, when Sackville-West was 30 and Woolf 40. Woolf was already a respected author, though her masterworks were yet to come. Sackville-West was just launching what would be a prodigious career as a writer of poetry, biography, best-selling novels and gardening books. Both women were married. Vita was bisexual; Virginia was not.

The play, cunningly directed by actress Zoe Caldwell, spans the relationship, from cat-and-mouse flirtation to Woolf's suicide. The women speak the texts of their letters directly to each other, with laser intensity. Redgrave is a magnetic Vita, a free spirit in pearls and riding breeches (she was the model for Woolf's Orlando). Though not as well-known to American audiences (her one-woman show, A Room of One's Own, also adapted from Woolf, aired on PBS), Atkins is every bit as good as the dowdy, neurasthenic Virginia. It is the language that is the raison d'etre here, and the two actresses toy with it deliciously. Nevertheless, the material is simply not weighty enough to sustain the nearly 2 1/2 hrs. The words are beautiful, but the subject matter -- auto trips, Virginia's health, contemporaries unknown to us -- becomes tedious.