Review: Pen Pals, a Sweetly Predictable Friendship Drama About Two Ordinary Women

“Promise me, no phone calls!” Jersey girl Bernadette (Nia Vardalos) reminds her Sheffield correspondent Margaret (Gail Winar) a decade or so into their snail mail friendship. Were Bernie and Mags, as they affectionately call each other, to hear other’s voices, perhaps the magical bond between them would collapse. So too might the sturdy, unchallenging structure of Pen Pals, Michael Griffo’s sweetly predictable play, in which the two women read their letters aloud from early adolescence in the mid-1950s until late middle age in 2002.

The all-epistolary conceit, familiar from A. R. Gurney’s oft-produced Love Letters, allows actors to bypass memorization altogether. That ensures that this off-Broadway premiere, staged simply but tastefully by SuzAnne Barbaras at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, has room for a rotation of guest stars. Johanna Day and Nancy McKeon opened the run and will return to close it (February 5-9), Kate Burton and Pauletta Washington perform January 29-February 2, and Ellen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Peil take the stage January 20-26.

For fans of the My Big Fat Greek Wedding franchise, Nia Vardalos (the writer, star, and sometimes director of those films), who played Bernie through January 12, has already been something of a pen pal we’ve gotten to grow alongside for the past twenty years. And while her Bernie shares Toula Portokalos’s wry self-deprecation, Vardalos shaded in this new character with both a wide-eyed youthful wonder and, eventually, an affecting weary forlornness that will be new and refreshing to followers of her film work.

Winar, who originated the role with New Jersey Repertory Company in October (and returns for one night on January 18 opposite McKeon), crafts a feistier, blunter counterpart to Vardalos’s Bernie. The serrated directness that Winar lends Mags lands especially potently when it’s pointed at her friend: “If you want a life worth writing about, start living one,” she scribbles mercilessly after Bernie announces she’s given up her acting dreams for a job in insurance. “Until then, please stop boring me.”

For a play about two women coming of age in the second half of the 20th century, Pen Pals has a bit of a Bechdel Test issue. The chief focus of Bernie and Mags’s exchanges evolves from kissing boys to sleeping with men, sometimes outside of their marriages. Pen Pals also lobs a lot of grenades at both women — unhappy childhoods, unwanted pregnancies, unmitigated tragedies — but the ping-pong structure doesn’t really afford them the time to process these challenges together. (The production donates five percent of ticket sales to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation so it’s hardly a spoiler that illness looms particularly large over the women’s lives as they mature into adulthood.)

Still, though those sorrows pile up in the narratives at an alarming rate, both actors brought their good-natured wit and warmth to sand down the more mawkish edges of Griffo’s script, enough to generate a real cathartic payoff. Vardalos, especially, made us believe that we’re getting to know a full human being who just happens to express herself through two-dimensional text. Isn’t that, after all, what the best pen pals do too?