‘Pen Pals’ tells compelling story of a long-term, long-distance, longhand friendship

Nancy McKeon, left, and Gail Winar co-star in “Pen Pals” at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch.

Are you nostalgic for the days when people would communicate via handwritten letters? I’m not, in the least. My handwriting is, at best, barely legible, so to write something that someone could actually read feels like a major undertaking. Give me quick, efficient email, any day of the week.

That said, I found “Pen Pals” — a new epistolary play by Michael Griffo that is currently being presented at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch — to be utterly absorbing, packing an emotional punch that, I suspect, wouldn’t have been there if the characters were communicating via computers and iPhones. At times, “Pen Pals” is so intense you forget you’re listening to someone read a letter, and feel like you’re watching a story unfold in real time.

The play — based on Griffo’s 2012 novel of the same name, which was inspired by his mother’s relationship with a pen pal — takes place from 1955 to 2002. Bernadette (played by Nancy McKeon), nicknamed Bernie, starts out as a high school student in Newark; Margaret (played by Gail Winar), nicknamed Mags, is the same age and living in Sheffield, England. They are assigned to be pen pals with each other by their respective teachers. And, improbably, they stay pen pals for life, communicating their deepest thoughts to each other, to the point where each one considers the other to be her best friend.

Despite their deep bond, they agree to never meet in person. “It works for me,” Mags writes, at one point, about their long-distance friendship. “Perhaps if we were closer (in distance), we would just waffle on and drive each other batty.”

Throughout the course of the play (which is directed by NJ Rep’s artistic director, SuzAnne Barabas), they simply read from letters written to each other, over the years, in character — i.e., as if they were that age. So for the teenage-years letters, for instance, they communicate with youthful bubbliness, while they read with more restraint and guardedness as the years progress. Barabas has them move around the stage a little but, for the most part, they just sit, or stand, and read. And it really feels like a conversation since Griffo doesn’t, for the most part, have them read complete letters, but lets them read just a part that is in response to the letter-excerpt that the other character has just read. For example:

Bernie: I am so glad that I have a friend to tell secrets to. Let’s make a pact right now, that we tell each other a secret in every letter we write. Your friend in secrecy, Bernie.
Mags: Here’s a secret: I hate my mother!

Both friends have a dream. Bernie, to be an actress (she winds up, not on Broadway or in Hollywood, but doing community theater in her spare time). Mags, to be a visual artist (she ends up illustrating a children’s book).

Nancy McKeon, left, and Gail Winar.

Each woman is supportive of the other. But it’s not always a lovefest. They do have some serious disagreements, which make for some very thorny moments, as they struggle to work things out, by letter. Ultimately, neither woman is willing to just stop writing. The friendship has come to mean that much to them.

Over the play’s 90 minutes, we get a sense of the way the world changes over the 47 years it covers, with innocent pop-culture references (Rock Hudson, Ricky Nelson, Grace Kelly) early on and, later, references to the impact of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, The Beatles (Mags, oddly, never warms up to them), the moon landing and, as the play nears its end, 9/11.

But as the world underwent some extraordinary changes, Bernie and Mags just went on living lives that could be described as “ordinary.”

Sure, there are some big shocks along the way, and some small triumphs. But these are not the kind of lives that most playwrights would normally dream up. There are no grand quests or pulse-pounding adventures here, just the normal stuff — adolescence, work, love, parenthood, illness, etc. — that many if not most people go through. Which makes Griffo’s achievement — his ability to make the story of this friendship so compelling — so impressive.

New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch will present “Pen Pals” through Oct. 20. Visit njrep.org.