Michael Learned stars in DTC's 'Love Letters'

She's back, and she's gonna be cussing, so just get over it already.

Michael Learned, the actress that so many boomers remember as Olivia Walton on "The Waltons" television show, returns to the First State this week for "Love Letters" at the Delaware Theatre Company in Wilmington.

She was here two years ago, playing in DTC's "The Outgoing Tide," with Peter Strauss and Ian Lithgow and enjoyed the experience so much she suggested to executive director Bud Martin coming back for the two-actor "Love Letters."

Not only will it give her a chance to return to Longwood Gardens, but she also hopes to visit "The Costumes of Downton Abbey" exhibit at Winterthur and do a little genealogy work with her cousins in Kennett Square, including visiting some graveyards where family members are buried.

She is particularly happy to be coming back to an area that has real seasons. In Los Angeles, she says, they have fire season, rain season, earthquake and mudslide season, not summer, fall, winter and spring.

The visit will have a bittersweet note, though. She was supposed to perform the play about two lifelong friends with Ralph Waite, who played her husband, John, on "The Waltons," among other roles. But he died Feb. 13.

"I'm very sad," she said. "He was a part of my life for over 40 years, a very big part of my life. It would have been lovely."

They had done the show together before. She has also done it with other actors, including Cliff Robertson, Stacy Keath, Ned Beatty and Gaven McLeod, but Waite was the best partner, she said.

"I don't know if it was our chemistry, or what, but we were just on the same musical page," she said. "He got so many laughs; I was jealous."

The four-time Emmy winner will perform with another longtime friend, Daniel Davis, perhaps best known as Niles the butler on the television series, "The Nanny." Learned jokes the only way either of them ever made enough money in acting to buy a house was by doing television shows.

This will be the second "Love Letters" that the theater has presented in a year. Last October, Gov. Jack Markell and his wife, Carla, did a reading as a fundraiser that helped bring in about $100,000 for the show. It was the start of a grand 2013-14 season that ended with "Ain't Misbehavin' " breaking box office records. That year has resulted in the theater nearing 1,600 ticket sales for the 2014-15 season, the highest sales have been in a decade.

Martin is delighted to welcome Learned back.

"She is a wonderful and generous actress and a lovely human being," he says. "This was her idea, and we are thrilled to have her back here."

She in turn is delighted to be back at the Delaware Theatre Company and working with Martin, who directed her in "The Outgoing Tide."

"It's a very professional theater, and it's so beautiful," she says. "I hope the community will support it. I think Bud is trying to bring a first-class operation to Wilmington."

"Love Letters" tells the story of Melissa and Andrew, two childhood friends from privileged backgrounds who write letters throughout their lives, which take dramatically different paths.

Learned particularly loves that A.R. Gurney writes about this class of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in a way that not many do. She identifies with the characters partly because she grew up in a similar household, although it was more bohemian than the life that Melissa and Andrew describe.

Her family lived in Connecticut and Europe. She particularly remembers living in Austria, where there were only two cars in the town she lived in, and both of them belonged to the Americans working for the Office of Strategic Services, which would become the Central Intelligence Agency.

"And my father was one of them," she says. Everybody knows who they were and why they were there, but everybody pretended like they didn't, she says.

One of the conceits of the play is that the actors are seated side by side, reading their letters. They have to listen to each other and react but not interact, which strips the story to its emotional core.

It's funny, horrifying, touching and sometimes shocking.

"My experience is that most people are deeply moved, and get a lot of laughs," she says. "And it's the play. It's not me. I think it does ring a bell for all of us because all of us have that one person that was special and you wonder what could have been."

She gets a kick out of the number of men who tell her that they didn't want to come to play, but their wives made them, and they ended up loving it.

But it's not "The Waltons." Learned said she was stunned a few years back when a man who had brought his church group to a show wrote her a scathing note, telling her that her language was atrocious and that he could not believe anybody would write that using those "swear" words. He accused her of inserting the language for shock value.

She was surprised at the letter, but her husband, John Doherty, was furious. He tracked the guy down and wrote him a letter explaining actors have to repeat what's on the script and they do not make up things onstage.

The man wrote her a nice apology and added, "By the way, I really loved you on 'Little House on the Prairie.' "

Contact Betsy Price at (302) 324-2884 or beprice@delaware

online.com.

If you go

WHAT: "Love Letters" by A.J. Gurney

WHERE: Delaware Theatre Company,

200 Water Street, Wilmington

WHEN: Previews Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Open Saturday and runs through Oct. 5.

TICKETS: $30 to $45

FOR MORE INFORMATION: (302) 594-1100; www.delawaretheatre.org