Creative Atlas and New Wave Arts are bringing their Russian-language staging of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters back to Midtown for seven performances, December 16–20, at the Sargent Theater at ATA.
The run is short: seven performances across five days, in the Sargent Theater at ATA on the fourth floor of 314 West 54th Street. The play is performed in Russian, with English supertitles for the whole evening.
This is a return engagement. The same company first played it at the same address last fall, November 19–23, 2025. Gera Sandler directs again, with Maria Atlas as Melissa and Lev Grzhonko as Andy.
Gurney’s two-hander, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is built entirely from correspondence. Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III meet as children and keep writing to each other for nearly fifty years, through school, marriages and the chances neither of them takes. Two actors, two stacks of letters and very little else: that bare frame is why the play turns up in so many languages, and it is what lets this version work in Russian for an English-speaking audience.
Sandler is an Israeli-Russian actor and director whose work runs through New York’s Yiddish theater scene and independent film. The company pitches the staging as a meeting of Russian emotional weight and American restraint. Atlas is a Russian-American actress, singer and songwriter originally from Saint Petersburg. Grzhonko, an economist by training and a Harvard graduate, has directed short films that screened at the New York Film Festival and now acts and produces in New York and Florida.
Performances are Wednesday, December 16 through Friday, December 18 at 8 p.m.; Saturday, December 19 at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.; and Sunday, December 20 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets are sold through the production’s official website.
