Sincerely Yours: A Conversation with 'Pen Pals' Playwright Michael Griffo
His warm, funny show, constructed entirely of letters, is both a gay son's valentine to his late mom and an unqualified later-in-life success for himself
November 19, 2025
Michael Griffo is an overnight success at 60.
A representative of designers in UTA’s theatre division, he became a novelist when he began publishing his Archangel Academy YA trilogy in 2011. He moved on to the Darkborn Legacy trilogy and a trio of cozy mysteries, all the while writing plays, never knowing where his creative writing may lead.
“I was pretty sure that I was losing my job,” the boyish New Jersey native tells me. “I knew [theatrical manager] Lisa Dozier Shacket through my work. I met with her and I basically said, ‘What do you think I could do in the theater world if I’m not going to be an agent?’ She gave me some insight, then very casually said, ‘If there’s anything else I can do, let me know.” I said, ‘You can read my plays.’”
“I’d written a bunch of plays. Maybe they were just community theater plays — I would’ve been fine with that. I wasn’t writing super provocative things. I’m not a 20-year-old. But I said, ‘I would appreciate it if you would read it and give me honest feedback.’”
Among them was Pen Pals, an epistolary work reminiscent of A.R. Gurney’s 1988 play Love Letters, which was about a man and a woman’s loving, complicated relationship over the course of 50 years. In Pen Pals, teen-girl characters Bernie and Mags begin, one in New Jersey and one in Sheffield, England, reading confessional letters to one another written from the ‘50s through the early 2000s. Along the way, their “conversation” turns from mean girls and the Beatles to the pressing issues of their own lives (marriage, abortion, adultery, promiscuity, raising children, loss, breast cancer) and the events of the world that touch them (JFK’s assassination, Princess Diana’s death, 9/11).
In a twist no playwright would dare try to pass off as believable, Griffo’s first response from a theater pro was a Cinderella moment. “Fast-forward six months later, I’m thinking she’s never read the play,” he recalls. “We meet, she says she wants to produce Pen Pals.”
The show was successfully mounted at Theatre at St. Clement’s off-Broadway last year and is back for an encore run at DR2 Theatre on E. 15th.
And the rest is herstory. The story, inspired by Griffo’s own mom, is a crowd-pleaser whose big heart and focus on the female point of view has attracted a rotating cast of diverse women that has included Nancy McKeon, Kathleen Chalfant, Ellen McLaughlin, Priscilla Lopez, Catherine Curtin, Pauletta Washington, Marcia Cross and more. Currently, the show boasts Emmy nominee Sharon Lawrence and TV icon Maureen McCormick (superb and you get to hear Marcia Brady drop the F-bomb), with upcoming appearances by Veanne Cox and Melissa Gilbert.
I spoke to Griffo about the genesis of the play — tickets on sale now — its gay appeal and what’s coming next.
As the play begs, I wanted to ask a bit about your background with your mom.
MICHAEL: I’m a Jersey boy. I was born in Hoboken and we moved to Secaucus, and that’s really where I lived most of my life. Then I moved to the city and stuff, but I’m back in Jersey now. It’s the classic gay son story where my mother was a widow and she was living in a building for seniors in Secaucus, and I felt I needed to be closer. And literally the next day, my friend called me and said a friend of hers was moving and his apartment in was available. I went, and there you have it.
And then I stayed after she died in 2009.
Do you agree with me that there is something about the story in Pen Pals that hints at the bond between a gay son and his mom?
MICHAEL: Oh, 100%. I don’t know how much you know, but the story is inspired, not based on, but inspired by my mother, who had a real-life pen pal for 63 years, from the time she was 14 till she passed away at 77. Sheila from Sheffield was her pen pal. My mother was an only child who grew up in Newark — that’s where she was born. I use some biographical elements throughout the play as framework. My mother was born in Newark, she moved Hoboken with my father, then moved to Secaucus, so that’s all in the play. The character Bernie has that same trajectory.
Were you aware of your mom’s pen-pal friendship when you were a kid?
MICHAEL: Growing up, all we heard was, “Sheila from Sheffield, Sheila from Sheffield.” Everybody knew. My mother was very, very proud of it. She was also proud of the fact that she graduated high school because back in the day, that wasn’t as common as it is today. My dad has seven brothers and sisters. Only one of them graduated high school. My mother was born in 1932. My dad was 1931. The Depression-ish, the ‘40s, graduating wasn’t that big a priority for a blue-collar family. She wasn’t snobby about it, but there was absolutely a badge of honor that she graduated high school and had this pen pal from a foreign place.