The Last of the Love Letters by Ngozi Anyanwu, produced by Crowded Fire Theater Company and playing Z Below Thu/24-May 3, got its start as a monologue for the beloved actor Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us, Gladiator II, and recently Freaky Tales, a movie set in Oakland).
During the pandemic, Anyanwu participated in 24 Hour Plays, where playwrights got a prompt from an actor. The actor had a prop in their home and told the writer something they’d never played before. Then the writer had a day to come up with a monologue.
“He sent me a video saying, ‘I’m Pedro Pascal, and my prop is this The Motherfucker with the Hat playbill, and I’ve never played insane,'” Anyanwu said. “That was the initial prompt that the piece came from.”
What Anyanwu wrote in those next 24 hours and beyond became the words of YOU NO.2 (Gabriele Christian in the Crowded Fire production) one of three characters in the play, along with YOU (Farrah Hamzeh) and Person (hodari blue).
Anyanwu kept writing in what she calls an “insane fervor” until she had about 25 pages. Then she stopped, and the play sat dormant until Manhattan’s Atlantic Theater (where her play, The Homecoming Queen was produced) got in touch asking if she had anything to share.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what it is, and it’s kind of a fever dream, and I was very afraid to share it,'” Anyanwu said. “But Neil [Pepe, the company’s artistic director] told me, ‘We have to do this. We’re opening the theater in a few months, and we have to open the theater with this.'”
Since the piece was short, Pepe looked for a companion piece; Anyanwu’s agent suggested that she write something complimentary instead. Thus came about the first part of The Last of the Love Letters, delivered by YOU.
Anyanwu, who grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, got her start with theater early. “It’s kind corny, but in middle school and high school, watching the kids sing in musicals and yell, I was like, ‘That should be me,’” she said. “It wasn’t even the star. It was the ensemble girl who would come in and do one line. And I was like, ‘Oh, I could do that. I can be the loud, regular girl and do her thing.’”
Anyanwu became serious about the stage at Pittsburgh’s Point Park University. “I found myself in the library wanting to read every play,” she said. “I was already on the trajectory. But I feel like college is where you learn, is this for you, or is this not for you? So, I fell into it, and then I loved it. And then I was like, ‘Well, I want to be a nerd about it.’”
Anyanwu, who also got an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, has acted extensively, appearing in shows like David Simon’s “The Deuce,” as well as in her own plays. Always working on many projects, before writing her play Good Grief, Anyanwu wrote scenes and monologues with a group of other first generation Nigerian Americans, including Yvonne Orji from “Insecure,” and Mfonisio Udofia, who has been involved with San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and the Magic Theatre.
When she wrote YOU (whose character description says “struggling/trying to leave” while YOU NO.2 is “struggling/trying to stay”) as COVID raged, Anyanwu says she was talking to her art form, not another person.
“When I wrote this, I was like, ‘We’re never going to leave the house again.’ And theater had died a little bit and I wondered, ‘am I ever going make anything ever again?'” she said. “My great love is theater. That’s the thing that frustrates me and annoys me, and I want to break up with, but I’m in too deep.
“YOU NO.2 is really about being left by the thing you love the most and how it can break you down. And YOU was very much the person who’s trying to get the strength to leave, but it’s never going to go anywhere.”
THE LAST OF THE LOVE LETTERS Thu/24—May 3, Z Below, SF. Tickets and more info here.
