High schoolers made a pandemic war epic from their bedrooms—and it's weirdly moving.
LETTERS, a dramatic historical fiction written by Mrs. Evelyn Merritt in 2010, tells the story of U.S. soldiers and their loved ones through their correspondence beginning with the Civil War and ending with the War in Iraq. Sahuarita High School students adapted the Readers’ Theatre play into a movie, reasoning the student actors would be kept safe from Covid-19 by filming them individually, and afterward the footage could be reassembled into a screenplay following the original dialogue.
Writing
Merritt's original play structure survives beautifully.
Production
Covid constraint becomes formal strength—isolated performances hit harder.
Director
Gamaliel Luna
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Readers' Theatre—a format usually reserved for live staged readings—rarely gets film adaptation, making this a genuine formal experiment born from necessity.
The dual-role casting (Teagan King as both Richie and Iris) wasn't originally planned—scheduling conflicts during remote filming forced creative solutions that accidentally reinforced the play's themes of connection across time.
US
