Maureen McCormick and Sharon Lawrence are two accomplished actresses who’ve traveled very different paths that bring them on stage together to star in Pen Pals in New York City. They will begin their two-week run on November 12, 2025.
I had the pleasure of discussing “Pen Pals” with Maureen McCormick and Sharon Lawrence via Zoom, and I learned a lot about the play and what inspired them to portray these two very different characters. “Pen Pals,” a play written by Michael Griffo, is unlike any you’ve seen before.
Maureen McCormick still saves love notes. “My husband leaves me notes on the coffee machine or in the funniest places,” she told me. “It just makes my day. And I save them all.” McCormick also loves seeing her late mother’s handwriting. She says admiringly, “She wrote everything down. To see her handwriting is so comforting to me.”
Sharon Lawrence also values words and speaks of the craft of acting with reverence. She repeats the credo she learned from her beloved teacher Larry Moss: “The actor’s job is to be private in public.” Transformation is the other half of the mandate. “For me to transform and convince myself, I want as many tools as I can get,” she states. “That’s costume. That’s physicality. And that’s accent.”
Together, they meet in “Pen Pals,” a life-spanning play told through decades of letters. “I related to both characters, actually, a lot,” McCormick shares. “When my agent sent it to me and I read it, I was just like, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’” The play’s heartbeat, for her, is the way friendship can hold contradictions. “Women’s relationships are so important. No matter how different we believe, we can still find commonality, love, and respect.”
Lawrence first performed the play last season and returned to watch its latest staging. A longtime advocate for women’s storytelling, Lawrence explains, “Saying yes to women is something I’ve prioritized.” She joined the cast early, during development with New Jersey Repertory Company and director SuzAnne Barabas. “If we want female storytellers, we have to build them, grow them, nurture them,” she shares. Though the script is by a man, she hears “the heart of the women involved: the characters, what they represent, and the time that they lived.”
“Mags is a sophisticated spirit in an unsophisticated environment,” Lawrence says of her character. At first Mags is a book-struck teenager in a small English town, and she survives by imagination. “She loves literature, and she lives in her mind,” Lawrence explains. Over 70 minutes, the role time-travels. “You start with the vibration that is youth…and arrive at discernment and wisdom and tenderness and responsibility and forgiveness fast.” She grins at the physical details. “Putting on reading glasses when her eyesight starts to go at middle age” is a prop that helps tell the story. “I’ve had to blow the type up in my script,” she jokes. “It’s fully happened.”
McCormick has been reading the script aloud with her husband. “It is such a beautifully written play,” she says. “I think we really need each other to share the good, the bad, and the ugly to feel like we’re not alone.” The letters ring true to a lifelong love of ink on paper. “My daughter has made me so many cards and letters through the years, and I have them framed all over my house,” she shares. “We really don’t have much of that nowadays.”
If “Pen Pals” is about connection, it’s also about the work of sustaining it in a loud world. McCormick is candid about how the pandemic reshaped her. “It was really, really hard for me to actually leave my house the first time,” she shares. “I was separated from my daughter for over three years because she was out of the country.” There were hospital restrictions when her brother battled COVID and pneumonia. “It was really painful…when you literally cannot go see somebody that you know you should be with.” Her conclusion is simple: “It’s super important to connect with the people that you love and to try to spend as much time with them as you can and share.”
Social platforms, she admits, are a mixed bag. “I’m overwhelmed by social media,” she admits. “Sometimes it gives me a lot of anxiety.” Yet she treasures her community. “I have really lovely, supportive fans, and I love connecting with them.” Their embrace of her brother, Denny, a wonderful man with special needs, has meant the world to her. “It’s so beautiful,” she shares. “When I feel that love and acceptance for him, it makes me really happy.”
Lawrence sees the double-edged nature of our digital lives, too. “What’s hard is making time for everything we’re expected to do and everything we get distracted by,” she confesses. “Because this technology puts things right here all the time, you can get very lost in that.” A recent text from a dear friend delivered devastating news of “incurable glioblastoma”, and suddenly, messaging became a lifeline. “We can find each other when we need each other so much more easily,” she admits. “The question is, will we find each other before we risk it being later than we doubt?”
On stage, the characters Maureen McCormick and Sharon Lawrence play rarely look directly at one another; instead, they listen. “We’re not looking at each other. We’re hearing each other,” Lawrence says of the play’s design. “We will start to hear things differently as we are more familiar with the material.”
McCormick loves that high-wire act. “I love theater,” she enthuses. “It’s live, so anything can happen.” When something goes sideways, she thrills at the recalibration: “To me, that’s the most exciting thing. When something doesn’t go right and you have to work your way through that!” Theater was her first love, and New York amplifies the vibrant energy. “The moment you leave the door, you’re surrounded by people from all over the world,” she says. “I feel like a kid when I’m there because of that energy.”
There’s joy, too, in the way this pairing happened. McCormick remembers first seeing Lawrence on NYPD Blue, and the two met at a recent Heal the Bay benefit. “It just felt like serendipity,” McCormick adds that mutual friends, including Camryn Manheim, raved, “You’re going to love Sharon.” Lawrence returns the admiration: “Maureen is a dear, kind, bright light.”
Both are keenly aware that audiences will bring their own histories to the house. “I would love to be in the audience,” McCormick admits. “It’s all about stories.” As for what viewers might take away, she’s humble: “Art’s subjective.” Lawrence has a simple invitation: “Come see it multiple times; you’ll have a different experience every time.”
And the letters? For McCormick, they feel like a promise. “When you have somebody in your life that you can share your deepest, darkest secrets and your highs, your lows, it’s a beautiful thing,” she shares. If she could write one note to her younger self just starting out, it would be short and sure: “It’s all going to be okay.”
“Pen Pals” suggests why. Life is wonderful when you share it with special people who truly see who you are, even if you aren’t seeing them in person. In the age of digital connections, that aspect of the show, among many others, is sure to resonate deeply with audiences.
Maureen McCormick and Sharon Lawrence will share the stage in “Pen Pals” from November 12, 2025, to November 23, 2025. Tickets are available now. Go to the Pen Pals website for more information.