Review: 'Bob & Jean: A Love Story' at Bay Street Theater

It’s a tragic fact of life. As children, we take our parents — and their stories — for granted. We don’t ask questions, nor do we listen attentively when they talk about how things were “back in their day.”

After all, we have places to go and friends to see.

But then we grow up. We become adults and inevitably, we lose our parents. It’s only then that we realize just how many questions we never got around to asking them.

Currently running on the Bay Street Theater stage is “Bob & Jean: A Love Story,” a world-premiere play that gives a son that second chance to learn the backstory of the people who raised him. It’s the tale of Bob and Jean, two young Americans in their 20s who are fresh out of college and just beginning to fall in love when they find themselves thrust into a situation beyond their control — separated by an ocean and the complications of World War II.

Written by Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright (and Sag Harbor resident) Robert Schenkkan, this lovely show is directed by Matt August and is a co-production with the Arizona Theater Company (where August serves as artistic director). After a run in Arizona, it comes to Sag Harbor as a highly polished production with a stellar cast led by the dynamic and charming Mary Mattison and the talented Jake Bentley Young (as Jean and Bob), rounded out by a third character — the Narrator, portrayed by Tony Award-nominee Scott Wentworth — who represents the couple’s middle-aged son as he tries to piece together the truth of his late parents’ early relationship through their letters to one another.

As the play begins, it’s 1941 and Jean, an actress, has just been cast in a USO production of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” and she and her fellow cast members are setting out to traverse the country performing for enlisted men. Meanwhile Bob, who has recently earned his master’s degree in playwriting, enlists in the Navy as a bomb disposal officer and ships out to the Pacific, first landing in Vanuatu, New Guinea, where he fills his time by collecting seashells for Jean, before being stationed at Guadalcanal where he cleans up the ordnance left behind after the fierce fighting there.

Though their wartime jobs keep them occupied, Bob and Jean’s courtship proceeds apace through their letters — the set design references those letters, with pages adorning the back walls and their words etched onto the stage floor. In their writings, the young lovers express, by turns, the fervor, passion, doubt, jealousy and enthusiasm of any new relationship, all while contemplating the kind of world that might emerge in the aftermath of war that will allow them to start their life together — or not.

Jean, in particular, has doubts — not necessarily about Bob’s love for her, but rather the uncertainty about his safety, the state of the world and her fledgling career, which was a rare thing for a woman to have in the 1940s. Meanwhile, Bob is aboard a ship on his way to join the fighting in Japan, where heavy casualties are expected, when word comes that a new type of bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that will change the world forever.

The source materials for “Bob & Jean: A Love Story” are the actual wartime letters written between the couple that were stored for years in the attic of Schenkkan’s childhood home. Because the script is so closely aligned to the real-life writings, there is limited information included from the outside world. Though Bob is in the Pacific Theater, he is witnessing only a small portion of the big picture, with views that are limited to what he can see from the deck of his ship or hear from fellow servicemen.

Similarly, Jean’s wartime experience is as an actress who spends more time fighting off the advances of love-struck enlisted men than German or Japanese soldiers. Granted, she has well-considered opinions on current events, but they aren’t something she is able to put into much context, given her own stateside view of things.

And that’s OK. After all, this is a love story and the focus stays where it should be — on their courtship correspondence. It’s not always an easy thing to rely so heavily on real life material, but fortunately for Schenkkan, his father was a wordsmith and his mother was an intelligent thinker with well-reasoned insight into her place in the world.

In this era of instantaneous communication through emails and texts, it can be hard to recall the days when it took months, if not years, for a letter to travel halfway around the world. A question in one letter leads to the avoidance of an answer in the reply. Jean sends Bob a photograph of herself, and when it’s finally delivered to his hands in the Pacific, you’d think that he had won the lottery. And in a way, he has. That simple rectangle of paper with an image of his true love printed on it represents the torture that Bob and Jean must endure as they stress test their long distance relationship.

For obvious reasons, this material is extremely close to the playwright’s heart and as the show opens, there’s danger that the unfolding love story — which is initially full of sweetness and light — will be too mawkish in its telling.

Though it risks being overly-sentimental — something that can’t be helped given the letter-style writing of the era — Schenkkan has wisely interjected interactions between his present day Narrator and the characters of his young parents. He’s able to raise an eyebrow at a letter’s phrasing, or question the nuance of some of the motives when language is ambiguous. This device keeps the piece grounded in reality and puts the limitations inherent in the reliance on the letters themselves into perspective.

No doubt, a great deal of the meaning in this play lies in all the things that Bob and Jean did not say in their correspondence.

Ultimately, there’s something touchingly poignant about the role-reversal and watching a middle-aged son interact with a younger version of his own parents. The tender way a youthful Jean touches the face of her gray-haired boy, or the wise gazes that pass between father and son as they bridge the gap of decades that has separated them.

Though this script may not offer a wider treatise on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of war, in his play, Schenkkan has shared with audiences the rare gift of hindsight. It’s a lovely way to open the summer mainstage season, and Schenkkan is so very fortunate to be able to see a younger version of his parents come to life on stage. If only we all had that gift.

In the end, it’s a love letter to all that the children of those WWII veterans have lost — time with their parents, the chance to ask meaningful questions and the understanding of what it might have taken to find love in the midst of a conflict whose outcome was anything but certain.

Rounding out the Bay Street Theater production team are Kish Finnegan (costume design), Mike Billings (lighting design), John Gromada (original music and sound design) and Kelsy Durkin (production stage manager).

“Bob & Jean: A Love Story” runs through June 15 at Bay Street Theater on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor. For tickets, visit baystreet.org or call 631-725-9500.