Robert Schenkkan's New Play Is an Ode to His Parents Courtship in WWII

Next Tuesday, Bay Street Theater opens its 2025 mainstage season with the premiere of a brand new play that has a decidedly local connection.

“Bob & Jean: A Love Story” tells the tale of two young people who fall in love across oceans and time in the midst of World War II. For the playwright, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Robert Schenkkan, a Sag Harbor resident, the subject matter hits extremely close to home. That’s because Bob and Jean were his own parents and the words the actors will say throughout the course of the evening are all true, based on the actual letters the couple wrote to one another throughout their courtship when they were separated by the circumstances of war.

And like many good stories, the life of this one began as they so often do — with a box of neglected letters stored for years in the attic of Schenkkan’s childhood home.

“Yes, it was exactly that,” confirmed Schenkkan when he sat down for an interview recently in Sag Harbor to explain how it all came about. “There was a box of letters up in the attic. There was lots to explore up there, but when I was young, I didn’t care about the letters.

“I was super interested in the seashells from Vanuatu and Guadalcanal that my father gave to Jean when he came home from the war,” he said. “The letters, not so much. But I knew they existed. Jean said, ‘These were from when your father was courting me.’ So I was aware of them.”

Schenkkan received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 for his play “The Kentucky Cycle,” and his play “All the Way” earned the 2014 Tony Award for Best Play. So turning his parents love letters into a theatrical piece for the stage is definitely something that was firmly in his wheelhouse.

“I’ve always sort of been the historian and genealogist of the family. So when we sold the house, all the stuff came with me and traveled to many houses, until I wound up out here,” he explained.

That included his parents wartime letters. Eventually, Schenkkan was inspired to take a deep dive into the treasure trove of writings and discover exactly what was in them.

“Maybe it was COVID that accelerated it. I would walk Long Beach and bring scallop shells back to my wife Deborah, and think of my dad gathering shells in Vanuatu,” he said. “My father called the letters ‘paper telephones.’ I began transcribing them — they’re handwritten and some are not in great shape, especially hers, because they were in the humidity of the Pacific.

“Once transcribed, I had to put them in order — not by the envelope, but in terms of the conversation,” he added. “Because of the vagaries of mail, they wouldn’t necessarily arrive in the order in which they were written.”

“Bob & Jean: A Love Story” is co-produced with Arizona Theater Company and it comes to Bay Street Theater having just completed its run in Tucson in mid-April.

“The set has to be adjusted for the size of the theater here,” Schenkkan explained of bringing the show to Sag Harbor. “The thing I love about Bay Street is the physical space. For this play, it’s perfect. It’s a beautiful production, the set is luscious, the music is spectacular. It’s a real pleasure for people to see it.”

Directed by Matt August, the three-character play stars Mary Mattison as Jean, Jake Bentley Young as Bob, and a third character, The Narrator, who is portrayed by Tony Award-nominee Scott Wentworth.

“The third character is me,” Schenkkan clarified. “This whole play is a journey for me to my past and my parents. To learn about them when she’s 22 and he’s 25 — they have these dreams, ambitions and hopes — it’s very moving and surprising to be in touch as I am now. The grown son is looking back.

The back story of Bob and Jean is that they had known each other as college students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, but were not particularly fond of one another.

“She was a senior and he was a grad student at UNC, and at first they really disliked each other,” Schenkkan said. “It took a while to sort out. She was 21 and studying acting, he was 24 and getting a masters in playwrighting.”

Schenkkan adds that in college, Jean was dating Bob’s best friend and the three of them would go out to the movies together.

“They would drive her back to her sorority house where the best friend would walk her to the door and kiss her goodnight while Bob would wait in the car,” he said.

But all that changes after they leave college.

“War breaks out and Bob enlists in the most dangerous job he could find — bomb disposal,” Schenkkan said. “He wanted his life to be in his own hands. No eager beaver lieutenant was going to get him killed.”

For her part, Jean, who came from a proud family with a long military tradition — her father was a highly decorated World War I veteran — joined the USO and was cast in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” which was set to tour across the country.

With Bob stationed in Washington D.C. and Jean rehearsing for the USO tour in New York, mutual friends set up the couple on a date to go see John Van Druten’s play “The Damask Cheek” in New York.

“They meet at the theater on Broadway, they look at each other and everything changes,” said Schenkkan, “this was a whole different thing.”

It was the end of 1942, and soon, Bob and Jean would be going their separate ways to serve the country.

“They fell in love really fast, before war separated them,” Schenkkan said. “Pretty quickly he’s sent to San Francisco, she starts the tour, so they’re writing each other. He is so gung ho – he says on your tour, you’re coming to San Diego, I’ll come down and see you. And he does, and goes AWOL to do it.”

Jean is performing for the enlisted men in the USO show at a huge outdoor army base when Bob shows up in his sailor whites.

“They have this one visit there, and they spend the night — one night,” Schenkkan explained. “He’s making big plans for San Francisco and he’s going to ask her to marry him. But then he immediately gets sent out.”

Bob finds himself in Vanuatu, New Guinea, 6,000 miles away, before then being stationed at Guadalcanal.

“He’s arriving shortly after the island has, in theory, been made safe – it’s early ‘43 – but he’s a bomb disposal specialist,” Schenkkan said. “He discovers a Japanese long lance torpedo, the premier weapon of the Japanese submarine. We had never captured one, and this one was stuck in a reef offshore, so he wades out at low tide to diffuse it. It’s 16-feet long with 18 kilos of explosives — for all he knows, this thing is booby trap.”

Bob succeeds in defusing the Japanese torpedo, which Schenkkan notes was on view in the Navy Department at the Pentagon for 40 years.

“Now it’s at the World War II museum in New Orleans,” he said. “That was the only one we found until after the war.”

When asked about the details and personal emotions he discovered in his parents letters, Schenkkan notes, “They’re performing for each other. They’re also on this physical journey. She’s all over the U.S. and in the Aleutian Islands. They are changing in response to these extraordinary circumstances. They are exploring what they are feeling, and discovering a sense of what they want.”

Schenkkan notes that the dialogue in the play is taken directly from the letters as much as possible, or from reliable sources when not.

“I really tried to stay close to that,” said Schenkkan who found that both his parents were very politically attuned at the time and followed the war closely. “He comments on the news of a successful invasion of Sicily where a huge number of German soldiers were captured. Jean describes her own response, saying ‘Initially I was thrilled and excited. Then I wondered what the cost was, because they never talk about that.’

“Her own father came back from war very badly injured, so the cost would be very much in her mind. It’s very mature for a 22-year-old.”

Bob finds himself on a ship making its way to Japan as part of the second wave of the invasion when news comes that the atomic bomb has been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

“He writes of receiving the news, saying he’s not angry at the Japanese, and has nothing but pity for them, for us, for all of us,” Schenkkan said. “He says, ‘This thing will take us to a whole new place. Who knows what will become of this world? If anything, it makes our lives that more dear.’”

As fewer and fewer people alive today have first-hand memories of World War II, the messages and lessons learned from those years become more important than ever to impart to the next generation.

“I do think this story is very interesting to people today — in many ways, it’s an eternal story of love almost lost and found,” he said. “In 1943 or ‘44, the world was in a really dark place. We know, of course, the good guys won, but that’s not how it felt at the time.

“Despite this, Bob and Jean made the decision to love, be married and have a family,” Schenkkan continued. “It’s very optimistic on the face of it.

“I say theirs was a hard earned love and that’s the best kind. It was a great marriage.”

Though both his parents were theater professionals, Schenkkan, the third of four sons, is the only one who opted to pursue the arts professionally as an adult.

“We went to theater all the time, they were very culturally attuned, but they never pushed it,” he said of his parents. ”It was not until I made it clear that this was what I would spend my life doing that they relaxed and signed on. They were so supportive.”

Schenkkan’s mother died in 1985, followed by his father in 2011. Though Jean never got to witness her son’s success with “The Kentucky Cycle,” which came out in the early 1990s, he notes that she did live to see his first play “Write Me a Murder,” performed at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, New York, in 1981.

He notes that all three of his brothers have seen “Bob & Jean: A Love Story.”

“It went well,” he said. “But we haven't had the lengthy un-pressured conversation of, ‘What did this raise for you?’ Everybody’s perspective is different. But everybody was quite moved by it and no one felt I took undue liberties.

“I was keenly aware of the responsibility,” he added. “Rehearsals were surprisingly emotional and watching my parents come to life was emotional, but in a good way. I miss my parents. This is an opportunity to have a conversation, in a way.”

And now that “Bob & Jean: A Love Story” is out in the wider world, what does Schenkkan believe his parents would think about the play?

“I really wish I could ask my parents. The answer is, I’ll never know. But I think at the end of the day they’d love it.”

Previews of “Bob & Jean: A Love Story,” begin on Tuesday, May 27, at 7 p.m.. Opening night is Saturday, May 31, at 8 p.m., with a red-carpet event starting at 7 p.m. The play runs through Sunday, June 15. The lobby bar will open one hour before showtime. For tickets, visit baystreet.org. Bay Street Theater is on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor.