When playwright Rajiv Joseph’s drama “Letters of Suresh” opens, Father Hashimoto has been dead for two weeks. In the Curious Theatre Company’s nuanced production (through Dec. 9), his grandniece, Melody Park (Desirée Mee Jung), is in her living room in Seattle writing a letter to a man named Suresh to let him know.
While clearing out the priest’s room at a church in Nagasaki, Japan, Melody came across the cache of letters that Suresh sent Hashimoto over the years and wonders if he’d like them back. She also wonders who this relative she never knew — her mother’s uncle — was … and sometimes she just wonders.
“I don’t remember the last time I wrote a letter … . I don’t remember the last time I wrote anything,” Melody, a writing teacher, writes to this unknown Suresh, tapping on her laptop and aware of the wincing irony.
Although “Letters of Suresh” is an epistolary work — with missives and a few texts traveling between the characters — not all the letters get sent. There are drafts. There are also completed letters stowed away because they didn’t say precisely what the writer had hoped; the writer had second thoughts; or that the very act of writing is really a form of musing or introspection.
With Suresh (Hossein Forouzandeh), Joseph revives a character from his 2008 play, “Animals Out of Paper.”
He also returns to that play’s guiding conceit: origami, the art of making objects out of intricately folded paper. The meaning of the yellow origami bird that Melody finds amid her great-uncle’s belongings will gain force over the course of the play. So will the folding of time.
The audience meets Suresh via the first letter he wrote to Father Hashimoto. He was 18. Over the course of the play, he will be 23 and then 28 as writes other letters. The two met at a ceremony at Nagasaki’s Hypocenter, or ground zero. Suresh was in the city where the second atomic bomb was dropped by the U.S. for an origami convention. Hashimoto lived at a church nearby. The way the playwright handles the World War II history of Nagasaki is one of the playwright’s most subtle, humane gestures.
An origami whiz since his early teens, Suresh may be deft with shapes but he’s emotionally clumsy. Sometimes his letters are vulnerable. At other times he’s angry, as when the priest offers to pray for Suresh’s mother. He had written that Nagasaki made him think of his dead mother. But he’d also written that he was in love with his married origami mentor. Hashimoto’s silence on that made him all the angrier.
Melody’s early letters to Suresh have a few starts and stops and plenty of revelations: Her mother likes to be read to; her father can be a “prick”; her sister, who lives in London, is estranged from their parents. After letting Suresh know of Hashimoto’s death — he was 93 — she continues her lopsided correspondence because, in one sense, it allows her to share secrets and regrets. Should it really come as a surprise that a play in which a priest is a central figure has notes of confession?
And though Father Hashimoto has already died at the start of the play, he will make a vivid and vital appearance late in the four-character play. In addition to Suresh in Boston, Melody in Seattle and Hashimoto in Nagasaki, there is Amelia (Anne Penner), a woman Suresh first saw at the exhibit of a blue whale’s heart in a children’s museum in Boston.
When Suresh writes Amelia, audience members might surmise that this is the woman Suresh was in love with as a teen. Wondering about that and the play’s other muted connections speaks to the playwright’s delicate and eloquent folding of time, space, character.
The closest the actors come to occupying the same space at the same time might be the smartly staged video chat Amelia and Suresh have, rife with hurt and fondness, old shame and yearning.
Scenic designer Markus Henry and props designers (Krystal Brown and Wayne Breyer) keep things spare but expressive. The few pieces of furniture — a sofa, a desk, a chair — are geometric in shape, mimicking origami’s elegant edges. Three floor-to-rafter panels upstage are sheer enough to see a letter’s addressee through and opaque enough for the projections of excerpts from the letters and texts. The lighting (Miriam Suzanne) and sound and projection designs (Brian Freeland) only add to the production’s understated beauty.
As if to upend expectations, Curious’ artistic director, Jada Suzanne Dixon, followed the theater’s season opener (“The Minutes,” a production that brimmed with company familiars) with a play in which nearly all the actors are new to the Curious mainstage. So is director Julie Rada, whose work around town is often experimental and always intriguing
The ensemble has chemistry. Trinh and Penner are particularly tucked into their characters, yet wonderfully present to the moment and to the play’s often beautiful language. (“You’ve already lived this day,” Amelia says to Suresh when he calls her from Nagasaki.)
Rajiv’s play and this production make scene partners of the audience. As the characters “write” their letters, their bodies most often face the audience. Eavesdropping is nudged aside to make space for more demanding listening. This is not an always easy ask, but it turns out to be a deeply rewarding task.
IF YOU GO
“Letters of Suresh”: Written by Rajiv Joseph. Directed by Julie Rada. Featuring Hossein Forouzandeh, Desirée Mee Jung, Anne Penner and Peter Trinh. At Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma St. Through Dec. 9. boxoffice@curioustheatre.org or 303-623-0524
Lisa Kennedy is a Denver freelancer specializing in film and theater.
