Like a piece of lost mail, A.R. Gurney’s play “Love Letters” has been traveling around the country with a rotating all-star cast since 1989. It was first performed when Gurney himself read the two-person play with actress Holland Taylor in lieu of a speech he was to deliver at the New York Public Library. In two years, the show has billed more than 100 different actors throughout the country.

Last night, Robert Reed and Betsy Palmer delivered the pen-pal romance to the Maine Center for the Arts, and it was, indeed, a special delivery for the smallish but receptive house of about 600.

An expose of suburban cliches and upper class customs, the play recounts 50 years of friendship between Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner, two charter members of the elite club that holds seabreeze parties and eggnog brunches. As we listen to them grow from ink-slinging adolescents to quill-driving adults, we’re in on a terribly voyeuristic and deliciously satisfying theatrical experience.

It’s partially the contrivance of an epistolary romance, but it’s also Gurney’s stripped-down approach that makes the play work so well. The actors sit side by side, never touching or even exchanging glances and read from (unmemorized) scripts set before them on desks. This is the extent of the set, stage directions and blocking. These self-imposed limitations, however, open up a world of possibilities for actors, and although Reed and Palmer got off to a rather slow and flat start, their performance was finally entertaining.

As Andy, Reed blended serious sensitivity with the right amount of self-conscious pomposity, preppiness and propriety. His voice still invokes images of the Brady household, but his performance last night was independently lively and enjoyable, even though the character of Andy is falsely charming and carefully fashioned. Bred in boy’s schools and ivy league colleges, he is the ultimate WASP, never stepping too far off the red carpet or too close to muddied waters.

He is, however, a dedicated and elegant writer who serves as an anchor for his less-stable correspondent, Melissa. “I feel like a true lover when I’m writing to you,” he confides to her. And she feels very much loved in the warmth of his words, no matter how boring he tends to be in his lengthy descriptions of sports events or literature.

Palmer’s crisp voice caught the coquettish and visceral qualities of Melissa, whose silver-spoon upbringing finally gags her spirit. Precocious, spontaneous and outspoken, Melissa learns the pains of life too early and the joys of life too late. Palmer’s performance was spicy yet demure whether she was describing one of her back-seat rendezvous or the pain of her emotional turmoil.

But Andy and Melissa stick together through their billets-doux. From punishments for passing notes in grade school to tabloid accounts of their scandalous affair, the two dispatch tidings and smoke signals that help them endure the rejection notices that even money can’t prevent.

If you can get past the overprivileged lives they both have lived, and the affected correspondence (that sounds more like a telephone conversation than real letters), then Andy and Melissa are somehow endearing, though never particularly admirable. The many comic exchanges and self-effacing moments in this literary love affair are surprisingly dramatic and star-crossed.