“CRITIC’S PICK: ‘Love’ is a great piece of theater — funny, beautifully staged, and with the kind of excitement that retunes your attention to tiny heartbreaks instead of just huge ones”
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“The story is as much about the characters’ trying and failing to see each other as it is about the audience’s doing the same. By the daringly staged last few minutes, it literally reaches out to you.”
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“ ‘Love’ does not rise to anything approaching dramatic peaks, having been stenciled directly from the lived experience of people like the characters we see...But even with minimal dialogue, the performances from all the actors are so finely etched that a certain sad warmth and sense of camaraderie with them accrues.”
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“The title of the play hangs over all this misery and by the end leaves us wondering what it means; in a place like this, people have no use for abstract ideas like love. Perhaps we're not meant to hear the title as an abstraction either, but rather as the name of a person.”
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“It's a terribly sad piece, an urgent wake-up call, and yet so enveloping is the effect of Zeldin's staging and so assured his ensemble that one can't help being totally engaged in the characters and their moment-by-moment struggle for dignity…The real miracle of Love is how it forces us to confront one of Western society's most egregious failings without making us want to turn away. It's an astonishing piece, and, in its quiet, unmelodramatic way, it demands to be seen.”
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“The script takes turns you will not see coming. The miracle is that, within these tight quarters, the human impulse to help, to reach out, does find room to flower. And if the play itself foments discussion, concern, and action, it will have fulfilled its mission.”
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Alexander Zeldin’s "LOVE" seems much longer than it actually is due to much silence and the reenactment of everyday tasks usually skipped onstage in plays. There is little dialogue and what there is tends to be rather ordinary talk about daily living. The play mainly works as a sort of experiment in the way that the Federal Theatre Project dramatized burning issues in the 1930’s. However, "LOVE" is a valuable record of life in a shelter using a documentary approach so real that it makes us feel like voyeurs. While the title remains unexplained, by the end each of the adult characters get to say it as a reminder that they have the backs of the others.
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“There are gentle crests and falls, but Zeldin is more interested in presenting a small period of time–of tragedy–in ordinary lives...These characters don’t live on the street, at least when we see them, but they are without a place to call their home and without anyone to help them find one.”
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