Strategic Love Play – 09 November 2024

Strategic Love Play strips bare the true intentions of the dating app generation through showing a first date in characters’ thoughts rather than the specifics of how the conversation might go out loud. Following the arc of a typical first date between strangers, a boy (Michael Zegen) and a girl (Helene Yorke) internally test their own boundaries regarding how vulnerable and how honest they are really willing to be based on a constantly changing calculation of whether or not this might work out. Both characters are conflicted, flirting with questions about what they want in a partner, how they would know if this was the one, and if settling would really be a tragedy. They have moments of going in and out of liking each other but, more profoundly, questioning if they even like themselves. In the end, the experiment fails in terms of finding love, but succeeds in terms of showing how dates from apps usually end, asserting what the online dating generation already knows but seldom acknowledges – if you are not honest about who you are and what you want, you’re not getting a second date.

Lighting (Jen Schriever), sound (Tei Blow), and scenic (Arnulfo Maldonado) design added an interesting dimension. Lighting slowly changed to isolate characters in moments where they felt alone and slowly added colors that made the room feel as if something meaningful was changing inside the characters, only to pull back when the characters’ imaginations stopped matching reality. The lighting was exceptionally beautiful. Sound design choices supported this concept, with the addition of sound in the bar when the characters were struggling with the loneliness of their realities and light music gently pulsating through their fantasies. Scenic design involved an elevated turntable that characters could step on and off of based on their engagement in the relationship, and there were moments (like the kiss) where the ground moved under their feet, yet they ultimately ended up in the same place.

Although the dialogue was very funny, and, on the surface, the play felt light, breaking down the crushing roller coaster of searching for one’s value in a stranger is actually profoundly sad. The girl wanted to get all of her mental health challenges out in the open, so that if he wasn’t on board with dating someone with baggage, she wouldn’t have to open up about specifics. He was wrapped up in protecting being nice, because he was hurting over not feeling lovable, and had no intention of being himself, because he wanted to bury that pain in the past. Even after their incompatibility was obvious, both characters started to imagine how it would feel to be on a date that was going well. They’d laugh and joke,and get to know each other, lightly touch and daydream about what forever would look like if they radically accepted themselves and each other… In the end, though, the characters were as incompatible as they initially seemed, and the girl decided to leave, abandoning the boy, isolated by lights with the drinks he just bought them. Though they could both imagine a world where they just decided to stop looking for love and pick whoever is in front of them, neither of them had given up on themselves enough to do it for real. Her last line, “this isn’t a good time” meant that it isn’t the time to settle, kind of like when he said it at the beginning, meaning, “I am not interested in dating you.” In the end they were saying the same thing, because they were wanting different things.

Those of us who have used dating apps have a lot of compassion for trying to make an awkward first date work, because meeting strangers whose desires don’t align with yours is frustrating, demoralizing, and just plain hopeless sometimes. As in Strategic Love Play, it’s common to feel like you’re not getting anywhere and you would do anything to stop looking, but it also reinforces the hard truth as best stated by George Furth, who wrote the book for Steven Sondheim’s Company. “You have to want to marry somebody not some body.” Strategic Love Play was beautiful and meaningful in the way it juxtaposed humor, pain, and the struggle to either find connection or force it to avoid dying alone.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Boneau/Bryan-Brown.