Graham Barnard and Steve Peterson as Jack London and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Karen Marie Anderson sings Hoagy Carmichael's "I Get Along Without You Very Well"  as Ben Livingston (obscured) and Lisa Cassandra look on. 

Wendy Gough as Calamity Jane

Maggie Peach as Queen Eleanor of Aquitane

Cast

Transports of the Heart

LA WEEKLY'S "PICK OF THE WEEK"
This holiday performance, celebrating our ties to loved ones and to the unseen forces that shape and move our lives, employs slides, letters, notes and an emotion-laden song by Hoagy Carmichael. Backed by Meg Kruszewska's imaginative direction and lean staging, nine actors deftly move back and forth among historical periods and characters, including Marie Antoinette (Pamela Salem), Vincent van Gogh and Samuel Clemens (both played by Ben Livingston), and Ethel Rosenberg (fetching co-producer Karen Marie Anderson, who also croons Carmichael's song with Graham Barnard). The superb ensemble weaves the thoughts and feelings -- passionate, joyful, painful, angry, funny and hopeful -- shared in missives between husbands and wives, parents and children, wives and interlopers, fans and notable figures. Quite simply, the endeavor cuts a swath through history in order to remind us what it means to be human.

Lisa Cassandra as French Writer Collette

Pamela Salem as Sidonie, mother to French Writer Collette

The Los Angeles Times

David C. Nichols

LETTERS DETAIL FAMILY DRAMA
With the Internet steadily debasing the written word, there is a courageous quality to "Transports of the Heart: Letters Through the Ages" at Write Act Repertory Company in Hollywood. Clyde Derrick and Gene Franklin Smith's readers' theater piece celebrates the supremacy of epistolary communication and the eternal pull of family ties.

Meg Kruszewska's clean staging puts content front and center, with the imaginatively juxtaposed selections taking in historic figures spanning the centuries. From Abelard's Heloise to Galileo, Thomas Jefferson to Amelia Earhart, their excerpted writings create a consistently intriguing collage of social issues viewed through a personal filter.

The Marquess of Queensbury's denunciation of Oscar Wilde abuts modern-day gay American John Johnson's wistful plea for paternal tolerance. Calamity Jane whoops it up in a letter to her daughter, while Groucho Marx takes hilarious shots at the brothers Warner. The conjoined letters of Marie Antoinette, Ethel Rosenberg and AIDS activist Mary Fisher to their children form a wrenching fugue, and so it goes.

The tech is spare and effective, notably Bob Decew's lighting. The versatile ensemble consists of Graham Barnard, Lisa Cassandra, Wendy Gough, Ben Livingston, Scott O'Connor, Maggie Peach, Steve Peterson, Pamela Salem and Karen Marie Anderson, all of them wonderful.

True, such small-scaled, specialized theater seems ultimately suited to the academic circuit, a natural for Los Angeles school district audiences. Nonetheless, "Transports" is keenly thought-provoking and genuinely educational, which easily recommends it. 

Scott O'Connor as Napoleon

Graham Barnard as John Keith Reynolds