Ethan Coen’s Let’s Love! wins the award for the most curiously titled play of the year thus far.
The trio of one-act plays that comprise the piece (Atlantic Theater Company, to Nov. 22), directed by Neil Pepe, don’t seem to be about love at all, but rather broken people and broken relationships. Love itself seems mostly extinguished and absent—not experienced, not considered, and very much vaporized by bitterness and disconnection.
The title, an apparent encouragement to love—with an exclamation mark that hovers on an implication of a celebration of love—couldn’t be further from any of the situations we alight upon. (Perhaps it’s, yawn, ironic.) Before the play begins and between each of its bitterness-streaked and not particularly insightful playlets, Nellie McKay appears on stage to serenade the audience with songs she has composed about love that sound sweeter and softer-focused than any of the dreary dramatic scenes we witness. Let’s love? Let’s not.
While the piece as a whole feels grindingly flat and airless, Let’s Love! does have star power, beginning with Coen—who has made 21 movies with brother Joel, as well as a clutch of plays and stories—and the show’s star Aubrey Plaza, appearing in her first stage role since the death by suicide of her estranged husband, Jeff Baena, in January.
Plaza appears in the second of the playlets, “Dark Eyes,” as Susan, a woman who has hired a tough (Chris Bauer) to beat up her former partner Dan (CJ Wilson), who has since taken up with Faye (Mary Wiseman). Susan is furious about everything, and so this at least gives the ever fascinating-to-watch Plaza the opportunity to go full-throttle on stage—shouting, swearing and insulting at will. She attacks her lines as aggressively intended.
“You think because you talk the way you do and your eyes are fawny and you reach out and touch the person’s forearm you’re the only sensitive f—ing person in the world?” she says to Dan. To Faye: “You trashed your guy and then you went looking for a new guy, more of a dope, someone who’d be ‘supportive of your c—y narcissism. Somebody you could grab by the d— and twirl around.”
The tough guy who wants to absent himself from the situation is accused of being a “f-g” more than once, as she offers herself to him sexually to make up for the extra $30,000 she can’t afford for the job she wants him to do.
The unremarkable set spins this way and that, as if a bedroom farce, between configurations of the couples in this piece, yet never makes a persuasive case to care about any of the quartet, although Bauer’s nervousness and his striking up a friendship with the man he’s been employed to injure, is a mini-treat of unusual male bonding.
The first and third playlets are quieter and slighter than the slammed doors and seething invective of the second. The first, “The Broad at the Bar,” is a shaggy tale which exposes the unspoken thoughts of two people at a bar, the Broad (Mary McCann) and a man (Dion Graham), who say all the things you might expect them to say late night in a bar—apart maybe from the Broad remarking, “I could wallop you with my breasts. You’d see stars.”
The third (and title) story, “Let’s Love,” features a Boy (Noah Robbins) and a Girl (Dylan Gelula) moving from date—that progresses from a particularly gross moment, well-acted by Robbins—to living together. And that’s, well, about it.
Perhaps at the end of this final story we finally sense a beginning of love, the span of it fanning into a future. But what rings in the ears are the motors of hate and anger in the second story. When a female character disbelievingly queries whether a male character has been hurt, he shoots back: “Me and every other man that ever walked the face of Earth and f—ed a woman.” Like much in Let’s Love!, these words feel grafted on to characters, rather than springing from a recognizable, plausible place within them.
Then there’s Plaza-as-Susan’s final meltdown, aimed at a young date (Robbins, in a second role). “The point is, everybody in the world HAS somebody!” she says/seethes. “Everybody in the whole f—ing world! No matter how weird and f—ed up they are! Even you’re gonna find somebody, you f—ing psychotic! But there’s nobody for me! There’s f—ing nobody in the whole f—ing world for ME.”
This is stated with a raw fury by Plaza, but within a play that doesn’t interrogate love, or even the source of that fury, in any illuminating way. Instead, we witness the darker dust and dregs of character and identity left behind long after love has left the building.
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