Past event
Date:
31 May - 2 June 2025
Letters Live returned to The Town Hall in Midtown, Manhattan, for a run of three completely unique back-to-back shows on the 31st May, 1st June and 2nd June 2025, each enchanting New Yorkers with the enduring power of literary correspondence.
Every Letters Live performance is a one-of-a-kind experience, with a different array of incredible performers reading remarkable letters written over the centuries and from around the world, authored by luminaries as varied as David Bowie to Charlotte Brontë, Che Guevara to Mohandas Gandhi.
These shows supported Choose Love and its essential work helping refugees and displaced people around the world, and one of the shows will be in in association with Montblanc.
(Click dates to expand/collapse)
Strip down, facing me
Tony Capezza to The Lowell Sun
You will have to destroy it at once
Vanessa Bell to John Maynard Keynes
I can’t fight any longer
Virginia Woolf to Leonard Woolf
A very terrible thing happened to me
Eve Babitz to Joseph Heller
Stupidity
Name withheld to Superior Insurance
I hope you will never get this letter
Martha Gellhorn to her mother
The life and the work are equally important
Andre Gregory to Richard Avedon
See you on the ice
Sahar Rizvi to a stranger
It is a choice of evils
George Orwell to Noel Willmett
To speak of me is to think of you
Fay Wray to King Kong
What did you say? I can’t hear you…
Katharine Hepburn to Spencer Tracy
A thousand times no!
Manuela Sáenz to James Thorne
I like words
Robert Pirosh to Various
Oh God, give him back to me
Eric Appleby and Phyllis Kelly
Letter to mama
Armistead Maupin, writing as Nathan Lane
Never turn your back on a hermit crab
Amy Sedaris to Various
How can you live like this?
Oliver Beal to Richard Branson
Hohnen Ford
Burn My Return Ticket (The Rat Song)
Starlight
David Byrne
She Explains Things to Me
Jon Hopkins
Intimate 005
The spectacle sickened me
George Bernard Shaw to The Times
You boys better shape up
Eve Babitz to Grover Lewis
The problem is the bottle
J. M. to Paul Newman
What am I doing here?
Dylan Thomas to Caitlin
My act is not a defeat
Andrés Caicedo to his mother Sam Nivola
FUCK the critics
Peggy Ramsay to David Hare
We were brothers long before you
Groucho Marx to Warner Bros
He lacks a conscience
Bruce Lilly to New York Times
This is quite true
Evelyn Waugh to Laura Waugh
Brother, you got a fan now!
Nina Simone to Langston Hughes
Who is this kid?
Tom Hanks to George Roy Hill
DO
Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse
Christopher’s choking!
Karen A. to Dear Dolly
I want to crawl up inside you
Patrick Cassels to Jessica
I just want you back
Lori Alhadeff to her daughter
Please congratulate the cows from me
Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West
DO NOT be so bloody vulnerable
Noel Coward to Marlene Dietrich
Dear MTA Riders of the Male Persuasion
Jenna Clark to Embrey
You’ve truly demonstrated the power of good over evil
Dr. Douglas Gordon to Father Bolton
IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER
Bill Safire to H. R. Haldeman
Like A Photograph
Great Divide
To my ever-loving wife
Don to his wife
The grand bi-polar old Duke of York
Martha Piggott to Private Eye magazine
The Matchbox
Sylvia Townsend Warner to Alyse Gregory
It was hard to wrestle those reins out of your hands
Sharon Horgan to men
Herbs is his Majesty’s
Lee Perry to Tokoyo Ministry of Justice
I love you—the way you always are
Zelda Fitzgerald to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Your actions disturb and inspire, and I can’t look away
Ross Beeley to a fellow gym-goer
He asked only for equality
Rod Serling to the LA Times
Our parents had often told us about you
Mae Bothwell to Statue of Liberty
Five accidents in two minutes
Fred Allen to State of NY Insurance
Please forgive me for not protecting you
Allisa Charles-Findley to Botham Jean
Do not be ashamed of your grief
Charles Bukowski to John Corrington
I can only hypothesise
Justin Lee to New Zealand Police
Have you seen a boy release homing pigeons from a cage?
Aline Bernstein to Thomas Wolfe
In our America today we can, in truth, smell it in the air
Lorraine Hansberry to Edythe Cohen
I have very definite rates of payment for animal trouble
E. B. White to Hope Crouch
Seeking wisdom
Cheryl Strayed to a reader
You Babylonian scullion
Mehmed IV to Zaporozhian Cossacks
Sleep well my love
Brian Keith to Dave
Dear Us
Toni Morrison to Black women