The relationship began with passing notes in second grade.

For 50 years, it continued that way - confined the vast majority of the time to written words. The series of letters between two rich kids growing up in East Coast boarding schools and going on to very different lives makes up A.R. Gurney's script for “Love Letters,” which Bandon Playhouse will present as readers' theater this weekend at the Bandon Public Library.

Andy Ladd (Dan Katz) and Melissa Gardner (Annie Ohlsen) meet as 7-year-olds in 1937. Andy's first note describes how she looked like “a little lost princess” entering the classroom. Melissa - less literary and more rebellious from the beginning - writes back mainly with pictures, including one of the two of them without their bathing suits.

After a few short years in the same school, they are separated and their relationship shifts from playtime in the pool to an exchange of letters. Writing comes naturally to Andy, whose detailed, informative letters provide a clearer picture of his life than the brief replies he gets back. A series of questions designed to elicit a more balanced conversation from Melissa generates a response of “No, no, no, yes, no.”

They still see each other when at home in slightly upstate New York, but those visits become less frequent as summer camps and ski trips to Lake Placid begin to supplant school breaks. The passage of time and aging of characters is usually denoted in the play by a series of Christmas greetings.

Melissa begins to flesh out her letters during high school.

“I talk about sex all the time. It's quite expensive but worth it,” she writes of seeing a psychiatrist, between getting kicked out of one boarding school after another for drinking, smoking and other infractions.

Meanwhile, Andy joins the crew team and sets his sights on law school. She asks him to write less about school and sports and more about his feelings. He asks her to go steady. She says she doesn't believe in it.

The letters go back and forth as they look forward to seeing each other but can't. Andy's school suspends one break because of the war, and Melissa skips the next to avoid her alcoholic mother. When she spends the summer with her father in California, Andy writes and writes again but gets no replies - one of several periods each of them goes through when the letters go only one way.

School dances offer opportunities to visit but often don't go as planned. Melissa comes to see Andy but spends her time necking with another guy in the coatroom.

The letters themselves are often a point of dispute in the relationship. Andy sees them as essential and intimate while Melissa finds them artificial and labor-intensive. She offers to lend him money for a phone line while he's at Yale and she's at Briarcliffe, but he insists on sticking to his letters.

On a weekend visit, they try sex and deem it a failure. The visits drop off after that, and life takes them in increasingly different directions.

Andy goes to the Navy, Harvard Law, a New York law firm, the state legislature and the U.S. Senate as a liberal Republican, married with three kids. Melissa moves through Europe, an art career, marriage, divorce, rehab, repeat. Both move back to New York periodically, but never at the same time. The relationship sustains through poignant letters as they go about 30 years without seeing each other.

Each goes through periods of renewed interest in the other, but timing is always a problem - like a soap couple, except neither goes through fake death or amnesia. As middle age progresses, it remains to be seen whether this “stuffy” politician and his “boozed out, cynical, lascivious old broad” can ever get together.

Directed by Louaine Elke, the show will be performed at 7 p.m. Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $5.