51�Թ�

The billet-doux closed with the author wishing “great suffering” on the tree’s proponents.

“Wayward” is a billet-doux to that city, where Spiotta teaches at Syracuse University’s creative writing program.

Nine years later, Melville assigned himself a far weightier role, as a journalist, in “Two Men in Manhattan,” his billet-doux to New York, complete with a suitably blowsy score.

Homicide: Life on the Street was a classy, multi-layered procedural, The Wire was widely regarded as a masterpiece and Treme has won rave reviews for its post-Katrina New Orleans billet-doux.

Bodinetz's production, jointly presented with English Touring Theatre, is refreshingly rococo – it's almost a novelty to witness a set of Molière characters corresponding through billet-doux rather than by text message.