Jenny (Heléne York) and Adam (Michael Zegen) go on a strange date in Strategic Love Play (photo by Joan Marcus)
STRATEGIC LOVE PLAY
Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Monday – Saturday through December 7, $86-$106
www.audible.com
strategicloveplay.com
The prospect of sitting through another play about online dating is as enticing as, well, going on an online date itself. But playwright Miriam Battye and director Katie Posner dig deep into the human need for connection in the Edinburgh Fringe–winning Strategic Love Play, which opened tonight at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre for a limited run through December 7.
“Should we just hold hands and start promising shit now so we don’t have to do this bit?” Jenny (Heléne York) asks Adam (Michael Zegen) when they meet at a table in an empty cabaret. “Sure!” Adam says, to which Jenny replies, “Oh shit! That was easy!” She reaches out her hand, but Adam does not take it.
There is nothing easy about online dating, especially when it’s about a lot more than just swiping right or left for a night of sex.
At the beginning, Adam is stiff and reserved, looking around like he’d rather be anywhere else than at that table at that exact moment. Jenny is open and honest, sick and tired of being let down by men and determined to make this date work. As they sip their beers, they try to find commonalities, but Adam grows more and more distant and disinterested, which frustrates Jenny, who suggests they just be who they are, whoever that is, “instead of the whole — I gotta seduce them by pretending I’m normal. But also disclose my not normal. In a fucking cabaret. So they’ll never be shocked or disappointed or leave me one day when I’ve put both my feet in —”
When Adam makes a move to leave early, Jenny is having none of it. She demands to know why, but all he can say is “You’re. Hey, you’re great” while insisting he is not a dick. When he lobs mean-spirited jabs at her, she initially takes it with self-deprecating stabs at herself until she fights back at his superficial needs and desires.
“So are you currently in a fantastic relationship?” she asks rhetorically. “’Cos I’m sorry if I was mistaken but I thought you were standing opposite me with a rock in your gut.” In response, he tells her she’s a sociopath.
When Jenny proposes a bizarre plan for how the rest of the date should go, he thinks it’s a bad joke, but he also can’t walk away as they consider future possibilities.
Adam (Michael Zegen) and Jenny (Heléne York) explore possibilities in potent drama (photo by Joan Marcus)
Strategic Love Play quickly rises above its clichéd rom-com subject matter, offering new perspectives on how two adults — their ages are never given in the play, but Yorke is thirty-nine and Zegen forty-five — might be able to find one another, despite personal and societal expectations and long-held biases and desires. It is like they are the only two people in the world; although there is a bar and other tables on Arnulfo Maldonado’s charming set, no one else is ever seen or heard. One of the themes is that two is better than one, in almost any circumstance; it’s evident as well in Battye’s dedication of the play to “the love of my life (tbc).”
Their conversation is a roller coaster of thoughts, feelings, and emotions between one person who arguably shares too much and a second who is bottled-up. Appropriately, she wears a low-cut, revealing top, while he looks constricted in his tight-fitting shirt. (The costumes are by Dede Ayite.) Jen Schriever’s lighting features more than a dozen large globe bulbs hanging from the ceiling, subtly changing colors from white, yellow, and red to orange, purple, and blue, both signalling and creating the many shifts in mood that Battye (Scenes with girls, Find a Partner) and Posner (You Bury Me, Hungry) orchestrate. Strings of holiday lights glitter above and behind them, as if something special is happening.
Both Zegen (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, A View from the Bridge), best known for his role as Joel on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Yorke (American Psycho, Bullets over Broadway), one of the stars of The Other Two and a regular on Masters of Sex, find just the right balance in their characters, who can go from likable to disarming in the snap of a finger.
By the end of the play, they both seem to be more mature and more attractive, as if our seventy-minute date with them at the Minetta Lane went very well indeed.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]