Just as it documents the life of a relationship carried out long-distance, A.R. Gurney’s quaint — no, positively treacly — nostalgia play “Love Letters” charts something more ruinous: The death of the handwritten letter.

Not that the play, written in 1988, once mentions e-mail or instant messaging or any of the modern technologies that has rendered the love letter little more than an antiquated notion.

(Gurney does take time to dismiss earlier pen-usurping tools, the telephone and typewriter, as too impersonal. And then it’s back to pen on paper, tongue on envelope.) Yet for anyone not fully hypnotized by the sugar-coated pap of the play’s storyline — about two childhood sweethearts from the 1930s whose paths diverge even as they maintain a penpal romance — the cooing of unrequited lovers is overwhelmed by something louder. The sound of a bugle playing taps for the end of an era.

THE WEIGHT OF ‘LETTERS’

Ascribing such gravity to a piffling piece of theater — in which two actors sit at writing desks and read a 50-year series of letters between two 1930s-era childhood sweethearts — may come as a shock, considering the play’s picayune reputation.

“Love Letters” is often little more than a handy backup for a theater whose original production plans have taken a turn for the worse. That’s the case at east Phoenix’s Copperstate Dinner Theater, which at the last minute lost the rights to perform the comedy “Greater Tuna” this summer and has, faster than you can say “You’ve got mail!,” mounted a quickie but still competent replacement.

At Copperstate, Peter Hill plays Andrew, a straight arrow destined for political office, to Jan Clevenger’s Melissa, a troubled girl who goes on to become a struggling, hard-drinking artist. Hill relishes playing youthful from behind a skinny charcoal suit, fidgeting in his chair, while Clevenger finds meatier stuff in her character’s older years, which unfold with tragic declining pathos. Together, they offer a nostalgia trip through adolescent frustrations, old-school conventions (like calling essays “compositions” and the use of dance cards in more than clichés) and the usual pangs of growing up. If they don’t exactly overcome “Love Letters’” syrupiness as much as bathe in it, Hill and Clevenger at least deliver their roles with sincerity.

It’s actually a compliment when I say I found the performance so natural, it allowed me to often drift away from what was on stage to other thoughts. Like my own love letters from years ago.

TAKING AN INSPIRED TRIP

They’re all up in my closet — hard to believe, every letter written by girlfriends in junior high, high school and even a few from college. Preserved in airtight Tupperware. An absurd act of archiving for a guy who couldn’t find last year’s tax statements, his Social Security card or first CD (Wilson Phillips, thank you) if given a full day to dig for them.

There were letters from Sarah, a relationship that started on a junior high bus trip to the Six Flags Magic Mountain theme park and concluded on the ride back home. (“I am mad because you hung out with James and Leslie instead of me all day, we need to talk” she wrote in bus-bumpy scribble on college-rule binder paper.) There was the two-year chronicling of my first love, Stephanie, in high school, with her Wiggle Pen doodles in the margins and random rock band declarations (“The Offspring rulez!”).

Though we’ve kept in touch over the years, my correspondence with Steph — who now works on the West Coast as a rock radio DJ — is the electronic type, via the popular online profile site Myspace.

I haven’t sent an actual letter in years.

Still, even I can get wistful thinking about the good ol’ days. It’s hard to imagine today’s teenagers having the same connection with their crushes, their e-relationships archived on hard drives or lost to the ephemeral world of instant messaging windows.

And there’s something disquieting about exchanging the thrill of seeing closing lines change from “Sincerely,” to “Love,” for today’s somber “The user has logged off.” Something disheartening about losing a pen-drawn heart for, well, an emoticon of a smoochy face. (:o*) Something sad about no longer having time to live a little between the delivery of letters; in today’s instant-reply world, how can there be time to find anything new to talk about? “Love Letters” offers its own dramatic sadness, its own dose of plot-driven bittersweetness that has nothing to do with encroaching technology or paper-bound obsolescence.

But forgive those of us who find something a bit more depressing awaiting offstage.

‘Love Letters’
When: 6:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5:30 p.m. Sunday, through Aug. 14
Where: Copperstate Dinner Theater at Phoenix Greyhound Park, 3801 E. Washington St., Phoenix How much: 6:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5:30 p.m. Sunday, through Aug. 14
Info:
Grade: C+