Love, Love, Love| a Curtainup Review

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Love, Love, Love

By Elyse Sommer

Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love
All you need is love
— from "All You Need Is Love" the 1967 Beatles song that was Britain's contribution to Our World, the first live global television link.

Richard Armitage Amy Ryan, Alex Hurt when life is still stretched out before them. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

If John Osborne were still alive, he'd welcome Mike Bartlett as an heir to the open-eyed freshness with which he and his fellow angry young men playwrights enlivened the theater in the 60s. Bartlett is actually better and more versatile than Osborne and company since his growing body of work reflects an ability to keep coming up with new themes. The only thing repetitive from one Bartlett play to the next is that it's always fresh and entertaining, with challenging roles and sparkling dialogue. Love, Love, Love is no exception.

Unlike his last London to New York transfer, the extraordinary poliitical drama King Charles III , Love, Love, Love is a more ordinary family's domestic drama. True to the title, each of its three acts show its main couple, Kenneth and Sandra, in a different phase of their relationship: youthful sexual attraction . . . love turned sour in mid-life. . .and love turned to friendship and yearning at retirement age. Since all this takes us through some sixty years, the play also functions as a way to look at the generational divide between baby boomers like Kenneth and Sandra and their children. This timeliness has been ratcheted up by the Brexit vote that was still to come when Lizzie Loveridge reviewed the play in London.

The fact that neither Kenneth or Sandra is especially sympathetic does not diminish our pleasure in following their journey from youthful hope to laid-back maturity. Ditto for their children, Rose and Jamie.

Naturally, even a work from as assured and original a playwright as Mr. Bartlett calls for topnotch performances to bring out the humor and nuances of his script. King Charles III insured a safe New York landing of all those elements by bringing the original cast, director and creative team along. Love, Love, Love arrives at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theater with an Amerian team. But with Michael Mayer directing a well-chosen cast there's nothing to worry about in the acting department. Nor will American audiences have a problem relating to these characters.

Richard Armitage and Amy Ryan with Zoe Kazan and Ben Rosenfield as their teen-aged kids. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Bartlett's smartly structured script gives its most incisive and funniest dialogue to Sandra, and Amy Warren more than delivers on all counts. She's hilarious as the stoned 19-year-old Oxford student who even at her most devil-may-care gives voice to a recurrent refrain "we're all going to die." She's unlikeable but compulsively watchable as an imperfect middle-aged working mom who drinks too much and is on the brink of divorce. She also convincingly becomes a wiser but still acerbic and good looking sixty-plus.

Richard Armitage, probably best known as Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit, more than holds his own as the rebel collegian descending on his more straight-laced older brother Henry (Alex Hurt, doing well by what turns out to be a minor character). His and Sandra's relationships begins with an act of betrayal (she has a date with Henry but quickly sees the bare-chested visiting Kenneth as more her type) which signals that their continued relationship will not be smooth sailing —and that like many of these Sixties dreamers they will remain tethered to their youthful selfishness. (Brother Henry does show up again before the end, but not as you might expect).

The changes in costumes (Susan Hilferty), hair styles (Campbell Young Associates), scenery (Derek McLane), make it easy to figure out what happens between the long leaps forward in time between acts. The personas of Kenneth and Sandra's teenaged son Jamie (Ben Rosenfield) and daughter Rose (Zoe Kazan) in the second act make it it clear that the zany initial meet-up has turned into a less than happily ever after situation. It's become a case of familial dysfunction in the extreme. Rosenfield looks and acts remarkably like his father before he abandoned his slacker ways to go back to college and become a home-owning, well-paid member of the boomer generations. But young Jamie shows every sign of not being able to transition to similar status in a changing economy.

Richard Armitage and Amy Ryan, long divorced but still friends. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Kazan once again proves herself to be a fine actress as Rose at ages 15 and 37. Unlike her brother she looks and acts nothing like her mother at any time in the play. However, it's to her that the playwright has assigned the job of accusing her parents of raising them to follow their dreams even as they contributed to those dreams no longer being sustainable. Thus both Rose an Jamie represent a disappointed post-boomer generation, with Rose angry enough to demand that her parents help her to get what she can't afford on her own. Bartlett has allowed her accusations and demands to be more than a little over the top — especially since they come at a time when her father has been assigned a sad family responsibility that brings Sandra's youthful comment about everyone dying eventually full circle.

While two intermissions seem excessive in a contemporary play, they're more than justified by Derek McLane's three terrific period and mood defining sets — a messy London flat, a suburban house and an elegant country home. It all adds up to a beautiful, well-paced production, of a beautifully crafted both funny and poignant new play.

Other Mike Bartlett plays reviewed at Curtainup
In New York: King Charles III . . . Love, Love, Love in London. . . Cock

In London: My Childhood . . . An Intervention . . . Wild . . . Earthquake

Cock

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PRODUCTION NOTES
Love, Love, Love
by Mike Bartlett
Directed by Michael Mayer
Cast: Richard Armitage (Kenneth), Alex Hurt (Henry), Zoe Kazan (Rose), Ben Rosenfield (Jamie) and Amy Ryan (Sandra).
Set: Derek McLane
Costumes: Susan Hilferty
Lighting: David Lander
Sound: Karl Harada
Hair and Wig design: Campbell Young Associates
Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis
Stage Manager: Davin De Santis
Running Time: 2 hours and 5 minutes, includes 2 Intermissions
Roundabout Theatre at Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre 111 West 46th Street
From 9/22/16; opening 10/19/16; closing 12/18/16.
Reviewed by Elyse Sommer at October 15th press matinee

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