Let’s Love!

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The fourth evening of one-act plays by Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director Ethan Coen is coyly called Let’s Love!, when by rights it should be called Let’s Have Sex! In three one-acts, all on the same theme, couples are looking for love in all the wrong places – or all the wrong ways. Neil Pepe, artistic director of Atlantic Theater Company smoothly directs the high-powered cast led by Aubrey Plaza, Nellie McKay and Mary McCann as he has done the previous three Coen evenings (Almost an Evening, Offices, and Happy Hour.) What is unusual about Let’s Love! is that the language is continually raunchy and the foul-mouthed women have all the best lines, though not the most completely written characters.

In the curtain raiser, “The Broad at the Bar,” a middle-aged white woman (who might just be a call girl) sits at bar, a regular there, trying to pick up a man to take home at the end of the evening. Like most of the women in Coen’s three plays, she tries to shock with a vivid description of her affair years’ before with a Black professional baseball player who seems to have left her (but he was married at the time.) Her choice of topic may be to put the man at the bar at ease as he is also Black (and married we find out.) Told as two monologues, the punchline seems to be will they or won’t they? My guess was that they wouldn’t as the man seems to be ignoring her but you may be more sophisticated about these meetings in bars than I. The man’s monologue seemed to prove that he has been a very good liar to his family.

The second and most substantial play, “Dark Eyes,” is a conventional sex farce complete with opening and closing doors except for its X-rated language. Aubrey Plaza, fast rising star of Coen’s Honey Don’t, White Lotus (season 2) and all 124 episodes of Parks and Recreation, plays Susan, a woman who wants revenge when abandoned by her ex. (We are never certain if they were married.) She is attempting to hire a hit man (Chris Bauer) to beat him up but has to offer him sex because she can’t meet his $50,000 price.

Just then the sensitive Dan (CJ Wilson), her ex, shows up thinking she is unhappy and in need of a shoulder to cry on. However, he is followed to Susan’s apartment by his new girlfriend Faye (Mary Wiseman) who recognizes the “hit man” as her ex. Things continue to get more complicated when the two men bond and two of the couples get back together. The play ends with Susan’s Jdate encounter with awkward Howie (Noah Robbins) -even though she is not Jewish – and which does not go as planned.

Plaza dominates the play with her energy, aggressiveness and foul language (much worse than the men.) As the tough, Bauer is wryly funny as a strong man who has deep feelings. Wilson is amusing as a man who is too sensitive for his own good – though he was right to leave the embittered Susan. As the new girlfriend, Wiseman makes the most of an underwritten role when confronted with two cheating lovers. Robbins is droll as a man totally out of his depth who doesn’t quite know it.

The last play of the evening finally called “Let’s Love” is about the difficulties of dating in today’s world. The Boy (Robbins as a socially inept youth, yet again) and The Girl (Dylan Gelula) go to dinner on what must be the world’s worse date: his upset stomach leads to him throwing up all over the present he has just bought her. However, she turns out to be very forgiving – or very desperate – and they go on seeing each other. The funniest scene is when The Boy is telling his work colleague about how the date went and he does not want to give details though the colleague (Graham returning from the first scene) insists that people share things in order to make connections. The message, unlike the second play, may well be that couples will do better to be kind to each other rather than cruel.

The evening is woven together by singer/songwriter Nellie McKay who plays a lounge singer who appears before each play and at the end singing original cabaret songs in the style of Cole Porter and George Gershwin on the theme of love. She appears on piano, harmonica and accordion, demonstrating her versatility. Costume designer Peggy Schnitzer has given her a beautiful wardrobe from tuxedo to evening gown, creating a different look for each of her four appearances. The final joke of the evening has the entire cast join McKay in the last song, each on a different instrument.

Riccardo Hernandez’s six appropriate sets for the three plays make use of a turntable which speeds up the time between scenes though the designs themselves could use more props and decorations from Faye Armon-Troncoso. Reza Behjat’s varied lighting creates moody light for the bar play, very bright light for Susan’s apartment, and three different levels for the last play.

Ethan Coen’s latest triple bill (his fourth, he is making a second career of these one acts) is rather thin, but entertaining nevertheless. While the plays have many surprises and twists and turns, they do not have anything new to tell us about relationships between men and women. One might be forgiven for finding the evening misogynist as most of the women are appalling though they are not untrue to life, just collected here they seem to be getting the worst of the darts. Let’s Love! is a mildly diverting evening in the theater but couples whose relationships are in trouble should probably stay away as it might just push them over the edge.

Let’s Love! (through November 22, 2025)

Atlantic Theater Company

Linda Gross Theater, 336 W. 20^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 646-452-2220 or visit http://www.atlantictheater.org

Running time: 90 minutes without an intermission