Love Letters
We have a very special, limited engagement you’re sure to love. From July 20 to July 24, we’re thrilled to bring you Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. Best known for portraying Elyse and Steven Keaton in NBC’s award-winning “Family Ties,” the duo brings a rich tenderness to this classic play about love and friendship.
Told through a lifetime of letters, we meet Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III who have been writing to each other since childhood. For more than 50 years, they’ve grown together, confiding their hopes, dreams, triumphs, and disappointments in one another. They share a deep closeness that is at once charmingly funny and a poignant portrait of human connection.
Accessibility:
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Featuring
Meredith Baxter
MEREDITH BAXTER (Melissa Gardner) - starred in five television series, Bridget Loves Bernie, Family Ties, The Faculty and Finding Carter. She made almost 70 movies for television, including the two Betty Broderick movies. In 2020, Baxter filmed Christmas on the Vine for Lifetime. She has been nominated for four Emmys.
Feature of note: All the President’s Men.
THEATRE CREDITS:: Butterflies are Free at the Windmill in Dallas, Vanities at the Westwood Playhouse before it was the Geffen, Country Wife at Dartmouth College, Love, Loss and What I Wore in at the Geffen in LA and the Lobero in Santa Barbara, Agnes of God, Vagina Monologues; toured with Talley’s Folly, Guys and Dolls and Diaries of Adam and Eve; together, she and Michael Gross have been in possibly 40 productions of Love Letters. Most recently, for the week of Valentine’s Day 2022, we presented the play at the New Mexico Actors Lab.
In just the last few years in Santa Barbara, Baxter starred in City of Conversation at the Ensemble Theatre Company and in Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth at Center Stage Theatre; she also starred in Women Beyond Borders at the Rubicon.
In 2019, the St. Louis Repertory Company cast Baxter in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Angels in America with Peter Frechette and Barrett Foa.
Baxter’s NY Times Bestselling book UNTIED, a Memoir of Fame, Family and Floundering was published in March, 2011.
Meredith is a speaker on alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, breast cancer, abortion rights, and LGBT issues. Aging gracefully with purpose, she might be speaking about that, too.
Michael Gross
MICHAEL GROSS (Andrew Makepeace Ladd III) - During his forty-eight-year career Michael Gross, perhaps best known for his portrayal of father Steven Keaton on NBC’s award-winning Family Ties, has portrayed a remarkable range of characters, starred in dozens of television films, guest-starred in numerous series, and was a series regular on the number one- rated daytime drama, The Young and the Restless. He has appeared on Broadway, in numerous regional theatres, and was the recipient of the Obie Award for his off-Broadway work. He has been honored at multiple film festivals for his role in the award-winning short film, Our Father, available on Netflix.
Among his big screen apperances, Michael enjoys cult status among sci-fi and horror fans for his portrayal of survivalist 'Burt Gummer' in the 1990 feature film Tremors, its Sci - Fi Channel series, and its six sequels, the latest of which, shrieker Island, was released in October, 2020.
He and his wife, former casting diector Elza Bergeron, have two children and two grandchildren. He is a life-long railroad fan, a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Yale School of Drama, and will continue performing Love Letters until he gets it right.
Find him at Facebook.com/ActorMichaelGross and Twitter @MichaelGrossBiz
