Love Story
Where past and present commingle—as they so insistently do in a play like "Love Story"—the burden falls squarely on the director to furnish the audience with a legible temporal grammar. Without such guidance, fragmentation risks reading not as intentional lyricism but as simple confusion. Here, despite the production’s many sensitivities, that grammar is not always clearly articulated. Judging by the palpable hesitations in audience response—the delayed laughter, the uncertain silences—it takes an inordinate number of transitions before one fully apprehends a crucial fact: that Maria is already dead at the top of the play. This is not, in itself, a flaw; dramatic revelation can be a powerful tool. But the production does not so much reveal this reality as obscure it, leaving spectators to assemble the timeline retroactively, often at the expense of emotional continuity. [more]