Mickey Ryan and Julio Cesar Gutierrez in Love Story. Photo: Geve Penn
In his book Sum, neuroscientist David Eagleman writes of three deaths: “When the body ceases to function… when the body is consigned to the grave [and] that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” Love Story, playing at The Tank through May 17, explores the time between deaths two and three, after a loved one has passed from this world and exists only in the memories of those who are left behind. Though there are missteps, the show—haunting in every sense of the word—is a satisfying piece of theater.
From early on it is clear that the play’s main character, Maria (Ally Callaghan), has died, though we will have to wait a while to understand how it happened. As in act three of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town where the Stage Manager helps Emily adjust to her death, the only person who can see Maria is the narrator (Yassmin Alers), who reads stage directions (Maria seems to be in a play) and to whom Maria occasionally turns for advice. The narrator walks Maria through scenes from her life (again, Our Town–adjacent), with the other characters—her mother, Noelle (Ramona Floyd); her boyfriend, Marc (Julio Cesar Gutierrez); and Marc’s father, Phillip (Mickey Ryan)—working to process their sorrow through memories and dreams.
Playwright Aurora Stewart de Peña puts grief, that most prevalent of emotions that is too infrequently explored in art, center stage (quite literally). Her refusal to shy away from the hard parts is what makes Love Story work. Because we sit with the characters’ loss throughout, we can truly empathize with both the living and the dead, and earn the catharsis Love Story offers us at the play’s end. Thankfully, Stewart de Peña avoids the twin pitfalls of cloying sentimentality and gloominess that often accompany the subject of death, trading them for moments of humor and disorientation. She takes joy in her anthropologist-like approach to understanding Love Story’s late 1990s setting.
Not to say the play is without problems. That disorientation, felt by characters and audience members alike, sometimes eclipses the action, frustrating us with unanswered questions for too long. And some artistic choices are just perplexing. The wall-to-wall narrated stage directions are sometimes funny and sometimes illuminating, but mostly they mirror characters’ actions on stage, which slows things down to a crawl and distances the audience from the action. I’m as big a Brecht fan as the next theatergoer, but beyond reminding me I was watching a dramatic construction I could not fathom why there was a play-by-play announcer with nary a football in sight. And the reason Stewart de Peña feels the afterlife is akin to a theater rehearsal escaped me completely.
Director Rose Burnett Bonczek gets solid performances from her cast. Ally Callaghan gives a grounded performance as Maria, marching back and forth between play world and real world. As Maria’s mother, Ramona Floyd communicates the complexity of grieving, the holding on and letting go. So do the men, Julio Cesar Gutierrez and Mickey Ryan. And Yassmin Alers does as much as she can with the thankless role of reading stage directions.
The design is fairly no frills. The most notable aspect of Micaela Bottari’s set is that the cast manages to find the seams in the transparent curtain. Lighting by Sarai Frazier and sound by Luke Hofmaier get the job done without drawing attention to themselves. I wouldn’t have much to say about Patricia Marjorie’s costumes except that the script calls them out, which makes it a bit of a letdown that there’s nothing remarkable there.
Unlike Thornton Wilder’s characters who (we are told) gradually forget the dead, Love Story’s living characters fight to hold on to Maria after she’s died. They want her to appear in their dreams and they cling to their memories of her. Yes, grief is hard, but not as hard as that third death. For when we fail to remember our dead is when we truly lose them.