84 Charing Cross Road

Helene Hanff

Adapted for the Stage by James Roose-Evans

Civility – I once wrote a story that intentionally lacked conflict. Titled, “The Wedding,” the story describes Richard and Brendan’s big, happy, outdoor wedding at a beautiful home along the shore of Lake Michigan. The story was part experiment, part political statement. Can a compelling story be told without conflict? Does Love truly conquer all? “The Wedding” was written and published before marriage equality was the law of the land (as it is now, for the time being, at least; one must never drop one’s guard when it comes to dealing with the fascists in the Republican Party, including those unenlightened henchmen who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.) Whether “The Wedding” succeeds is not for me to judge. (Writers are often least capable of judging their own work.) But “84 Charing Cross Road,” published in 1983 after its premiere in 1982 and long before my humble experiment, proves a conflict-free story can be entrancing even without a spark of conflict. Based on their true story, the play tells the tale of New Yorker Helene Hanff and the 20-year correspondence she exchanged post-World War II with the booksellers at London’s Marks & Co. The play worked 30-plus years ago perhaps for the same reason the play works today: There is so much conflict in our daily lives, off the page and outside the theater – Trump is a volcanic, spewing, bigoted blowhard with the world’s most effective megaphone, substance-free punditry fills our airwaves and digital screens – that the joy of being transported to a civil place (a loving wedding, literary letter-swapping among intelligent people) can transfix the reader and viewer. Civility is a cousin to Love, and Loves does, indeed, conquer all. Even fascism.