Letters to Joan
Premiered at Edinburgh Fringe 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “Letters to Joan made me homesick. It compelled me to walk the long way home listening to music and feeling existential, then ring my grandparents to chat for hours when I got back.”
THE STUDENT
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“Undeniably beautiful and moving – a million thoughts on generational divide and lives-unlived summed up in a few short, heartbreaking sentences.”
LOST IN THEATRELAND
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“This gentle, intimate drama explores is an evocative, vivacious portrait of her grandparents through words” where Streit’s grandparents letters are compared with those of Sylvia Plath’s from the same year.EDINBURGH GUIDE
A conversation across time: the dreams we chase, the ones we abandon, and the unshakable longing for the life that might have been
A granddaughter finds her grandmother’s 1956 love letters, uncovering a lost dream and a story of love, grief, and the choices that shape us. A true story unfolding between a Brooklyn summer and a present-day diner, where past and present blur.
About The SHOW
In 1956 Brooklyn, an aspiring playwright falls in love, her letters brimming with desire and ambition. Decades later, her granddaughter, a writer herself, uncovers them—tracing the arc of a love story cut short and a dream left unfinished. Between a Brooklyn summer alive with possibility and a present-day American diner steeped in nostalgia, past and present blur.
She sits across from the man who once held her grandmother’s heart, wrestling with the choices that shaped two lives. Letters to Joan is a true story that explores the dreams we chase, the ones we abandon, and the unshakable longing for the life that might have been.
"All of us at one time or another get tangled in tall tales"
The Story Behind the Play
1956
2001
1957
Two years ago, I stumbled upon hundreds of love letters my grandparents wrote when they first met. Both passed away before I was eleven, and though I have memories of them, I never truly knew them. But in reading their words, I felt as if I was meeting them for the first time.That discovery became Letters to Joan, premiering this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival—the largest arts festival in the world.
Bringing Letters to Joan to Life
A Dream Fulfilled
My grandmother, I discovered, once dreamed of being a playwright.
She studied playwriting at Columbia University, in New York City, just a block from where I later found myself writing at The Hungarian Pastry Shop, eating the same cheese danishes, staring at my own pages. But life took her in a different direction, and she never pursued that dream.
Now, as I prepare to bring my first play to Edinburgh, it feels like I am not only realizing my dream, but hers as well.