When Linda Purl and her real life partner, Patrick Duffy, take to the stage to perform Love Letters, they can be forgiven if there is an occasional, if faint, sense of déjà vu, sharing in their own way both the distance and intimacy of the characters they portray.

Judson Theatre’s production of Love Letters, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama written by A. R. Gurney, takes the main stage at the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center’s Owens Auditorium on Friday Nov. 14, at 7 p.m., with additional shows on Saturday Nov. 15, at 2 p.m. (with a “talkback” session with the actors following), and on Sunday, Nov. 16, at 3 p.m.

The play, first performed in 1988 and debuting both off Broadway and on the following year, is told in the epistolary form. The play’s sole characters, Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, are side by side, seated at tables or standing, reading the notes and letters they have exchanged over five decades living their separate lives. In those intimate communications they tell each other about their dreams and ambitions, their hopes and disappointments. Coincidentally, Love Letters was Judson Theatre’s inaugural play in 2012, starring Tab Hunter and Joyce DeWitt.

Purl and Duffy became a couple via Zoom during the COVID pandemic, mimicking in their own way a shorter, more hi-tech version of Gurney’s characters though, as Purl says, “We’re so different from the characters we play. We first met when we were in our late 20s. We did a reading together. Literally 20 years later we bumped into each other again. And 20 years after that. We had these momentary, ‘Oh, hi. How are you doing? Nice to see you. Great. Great.’ And 20 years would pass and we’d have the same conversation.”

The lockdown changed all that. No one was working, the theater world was closed. Their relationship began in a group text and elevated to a standing date every evening. They even dined together a thousand miles apart until one day Duffy got in his car and drove from Oregon to Colorado. They’ve rarely been apart since.

Love Letters is a bit player in that. They’ve performed it multiple times in a half a dozen or more locations including London, Belfast, Florence and now Pinehurst. This will be the third time Purl — best known for her roles in The Office, Happy Days and Matlock — performs in a Judson Theatre production, having appeared in Joan Didion’s emotional one-woman play The Year of Magical Thinking, and in Jeffrey Hatcher’s comedy Mrs. Mannerly, both in BPAC’s black box McPherson Theater. “It’s become a very special place for me because of the guys who run it, Morgan (Sills) and Dan (Haley),” says Purl.

Each time Duffy and Purl do Love Letters together, it reveals more nuance for them. “It’s really the mark of such a good play,” says Purl. “You think, oh, this time it’s not going to get me, it’s not going to zap me in the heart or stomach, but it does. It seems like a simple play, and it is — and it isn’t.”

Duffy, well-known for his roles as Bobby Ewing in the nighttime soap Dallas and as Frank Lambert in Step by Step, has the same reaction. “The beauty of it is that it takes place over 55-60 years of these peoples’ lives,” he says. “You discover things from when they were 12 that you might not have thought about in rehearsal or the first three or four times you did it. Every time there’s a nice little treat, I would say, in doing the show. It never gets old.”

Does their own experience inform their work in Love Letters? On the margin, perhaps. “When you’re out there, you use everything you can,” says Purl.

“In my mind there’s no specific correlation as I’m doing it,” says Duffy, “but we confess this all the time — every once in a while on stage I’ll look at Linda and she’ll give me one of those looks that cemented the deal over Zoom.”