To See or Not to See: Love, Love, Love

Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love is a darkly comedic play that focuses on selfishness and its repercussions. It is a story of an insular couple whose own happiness matters more than anyone else’s around them—including their own children.

Love, Love, Love is told over the course of three different decades, in three different acts. We first meet two young men—Kenneth (Richard Armitage) and Henry (Alex Hurt)—in the mid-1960s. Henry is working in London, and his younger brother, Kenneth, has come to live with him during his summer off from school. Henry’s girlfriend, Sanrda (Amy Ryan), comes over and is enamored with fellow-Oxfordite Kenneth. The two, naturally, fall for each other, and The Beatles’s “All You Need is Love” blares from the television. From there we jump to the 1980s where Kenneth and Sandra have abandoned their “free spirit” and “free love” lifestyle and succumbed to office jobs. They have created a middle-class suburban home for themselves and their two children, Rose (Zoe Kazan) and Jamie (Ben Rosenfield). However, despite growing older, they have not actually matured out of their “I’m the center of the universe” thinking. Fast-forward again to mid-2000s. Kenneth and Sandra are in their mid-60s; their children are grown and each struggling with their lives. Again, everyone may have aged in years, but they have not aged in maturity.

Love, Love, Love‘s satirical look at the nature of these two people falls a bit short. The characters, while engaging in their deficiencies, are broad generalizations and stand-ins for a generation of people, but it doesn’t dispel the fact that they are mostly unlikeable and irritating characters. So, even though the intention is for Kenneth and Sandra to be goofily self-involved and bad parents in order to comment on the narcissisticness and self-centeredness of the baby boomer generation (and the repercussions of that), it doesn’t quite make a lasting statement that will echo for years to come. Love, Love, Love is not a play that is making a unique statement.

Despite the fallacies of the play itself, the production was slick and well-done. The set design by Derek McLane was superb. From young bachelor pad with minimal furniture to middle-class family home to upper-middle class home, every little detail was accounted for. Additionally, the acting was all-around fantastic. Alex Hurt’s Henry is resentful—made up of many quick flashes of shock, humiliation, and hurt that seem so natural and of the moment. Richard Armitage and Amy Ryan age from 19 to mid-60s, changing mannerisms to match, but never changing their essential selves. They are quick with their snark and at ease with each other. Zoe Kazan and Ben Rosenfield capture their troubled children quite well. Kazan brings Rose to life with her whininess, constant attempts at grabbing her parents’s attention, and unhappiness. On the other hand, Jamie’s willful ignorance to the troubles around him manifest in mind-numbing actions that Rosenfield uncomfortably portrays. The ramifications of the older generation on the younger one is heartrendingly clear.

In the end, Love, Love, Love makes the irony of the song “All You Need is Love” that begins and ends the play dishearteningly clear.

Love, Love, Love is playing at The Laura Pels Theatre through December 18.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus