Theatre in Review: Love, Love, Love (Roundabout Theatre Company)

	Zoe Kazan, Amy Ryan. Photo: Joan Marcus

Decade after decade, selfishness never goes out of style; so goes the message of Love, Love, Love. Mike Bartlett, last seen in New York with his "future history" play, King Charles III, returns with a once-over-lightly -- very lightly -- excursion through nearly fifty years of social history, setting his characters against varying backgrounds defined by changing social mores. The playwright's indictment of superficial baby-boomer values doesn't quite land, since it comes wrapped in a slick comedy filled with characters who are little more than human targets for barbed commentary. Cheers to director Michael Mayer and his gifted cast for keeping things lively as these shallow, self-obsessed people misbehave across three different time frames.

Act I is set in a grungy London flat, circa 1967. It is rented by Henry, who is 24 and rather sullen; that last quality, combined with a leather jacket, has attracted the attention of Sandra, a 19-year-old Oxford student. (That leather jacket reminds her of Joe Orton.) Sandra has just been sacked from her summer job as a store clerk for smoking pot while waiting on a customer. ("I thought that's in the spirit of the place, it's groovy, very now, they'll like it," she says, by way of explanation. "But the customer complained, didn't he, bloody bastard, and they kicked me out on the street straight away.") Henry has big plans for a night with Sandra, but first he has to get rid of Kenneth, his brother, who is spending his summer vacation from Oxford lazing on Henry's couch. Neither threats nor bribery do the trick, and as soon as Sandra lays eyes on Kenneth, Henry is forgotten; within a minute, she is making plans for her and Kenneth to live and travel together. "Sometimes you have to do what feels right," she says, callously, explaining that Henry will get over it. Indeed, Sandra has found a soulmate in Kenneth, who is ready to swing with the '60s: "Nothing like this has ever happened before. The laws are constantly being overthrown, the boundaries of what's possible, the music's exploding, the walls collapsing. That's what's going on. That's what's changing. We travel, do what we want, wear what we like. Enjoy it. Experiment."

The 1960s have been so thoroughly strip-mined for easy ironies by opportunistic writers that the subject is pretty much exhausted, and listening to Kenneth and Sandra cloak their self-serving actions in starry-eyed pronouncements about the groovy future isn't much fun, since we already know how rapidly their psychedelic bubble will burst. What tension this scene offers is provided by Mayer's taut direction and the stellar work of Amy Ryan, who makes it blindingly clear that, at 19, Sandra is already a handful, whether coming on to both brothers at once or recalling how she verbally savaged the cop who found her sleeping all night in a park.

Act II swaps out one set of clichés for another, as the action advances to 1990. Margaret Thatcher's reign as prime minister is in decline as the country is torn apart over her proposed poll tax. Kenneth and Sandra have morphed into overscheduled, overworked careerists, neither of whom has a free minute for their highly strung daughter, Rose, or their trouble-making son, Jamie. Staged on the eve of Rose's 16th birthday, with a family party that begins in recriminations and ends in a series of shocker revelations, this act has some of the comic ferocity of an Alan Ayckbourn play. "We live in Reading. Something's gone wrong," announces Kenneth, trying to get to the bottom of things as he surveys the family chaos. Reacting to a volley of abuse from her daughter, Sandra says, "I'm a bitch, I love this swearing, it's very sweet, isn't it Kenneth? She really is growing up." Following yet another instance of too much information shared in front of the kids, Kenneth asks, "Why are you involving them?" "Because technically, we're a family," Sandra replies.

Act III catches up with the characters in 2010, when the scattered members of this far-flung clan reassemble for a funeral. The action is dominated by Rose, now in her late thirties, who makes a request: Kenneth and Sandra should buy her a house. As she explains to her stunned parents, she belongs to the generation of diminished expectations, getting by on yearly earnings that constitute barely a third of her father's retirement income -- she even accuses Kenneth and Sandra of betraying her by supporting her career as a violinist, which has failed to provide her with a decent living. Her argument quickly descends into a full-on attack: "You didn't change the world, you bought it. Privatized it. What did you stand for? Peace? Love? Nothing except being able to do whatever the fuck you wanted." As with the rest of Love, Love, Love, this argument, if sometimes wittily and forcefully presented, is too well-worn to have very much impact.

If Love, Love, Love has only the usual things to say about changing times and values, it remains eminently watchable, thanks to the efforts of Mayer, a fine design team, and a cast equipped to lend Bartlett's arguments a power that they don't natively possess. Among the men, Richard Armitage succeeds the best, cannily charting Kenneth's evolution from wide-eyed '60s experimenter, ready to soak up any and all experiences, to weary, nerve-wracked husband and father and, later, retiree living in splendid isolation with Jamie, who has never managed the trick of growing up. He is at his finest when, fed up with Rose's neediness, he fights back, saying, "Why did you listen to us? We're your parents...Why the hell did you take any notice of what we told you? You're supposed to rebel. That's what you're supposed to do." In contrast, Alex Hurt doesn't have enough to do as Henry, who gets stiffed in love, then drops out of the action. Ben Rosenfield does his best as Jamie, who suffers from some ill-defined and hard-to-believe emotional disturbance that makes it impossible for him to thrive in the world. (It almost looks as if Bartlett wants us to believe that Kenneth and Sandra's marital problems have made Jamie autistic.)

Both female roles offer more opportunities, which are seized with relish here. Ryan's Sandra is scorching throughout, whether using Russia, the atom bomb, and Vietnam as good reasons why she and Kenneth should run off together; staggering, under the influence, across the stage with a birthday cake, which she proceeds to cut into chunks and toss at her loved ones; or staring at the furious Rose in blank incomprehension and calmly asking her for yet another top-up on her white wine. Zoe Kazan's Rose is at first a tinderbox of adolescent rage, her face permanently poised to collapse in a flood of tears, and, later, chic and composed, if no less ready to denounce her parents as agents of ruin.

The production's design cleverly makes note of changing times and the characters' shifting circumstances. Derek McLane's scenic design features Henry's filthy, cluttered flat; Kenneth and Sandra's posh suburban home, dominated by large and expensive-looking paintings; and Kenneth's stately country home. (Interestingly, the first set is the most detailed, complete with walls and ceiling; the characters' increasing wealth is suggested using a few elegant details.) Susan Hilferty's costume designs constitute a mini-history of fashion; they include an orange-and-purple geometric pattern mini-dress and blood-red success suit for Sandra, and wildly different looks -- a school uniform and chic black pants and sweater -- for Rose at different stages. David Lander's lighting is typically efficient. Kai Harada's sound design includes a number of era-establishing musical selections and excerpts from television broadcasts. If The Beatles' "All You Need is Love" is mined for heavy irony, the fault is Bartlett's, not the sound designer's.

If you're going to indict an entire generation for its shallow values, your play is going to need more heft than this slick, superficial effort. There's no real social commentary here, just a pretext for his characters' atrocious carrying-on. Bartlett, happily, isn't interested in sentimentally mourning the idealism of the '60s, but his approach, with its reflexive cynicism, doesn't yield sufficiently compelling results. Kenneth and Sandra are so two-dimensional -- and they develop in such unsurprising ways -- that, without this cast, one would have little interest in their fates. Indeed, we leave them as we found them, still making messes for others to clean up. It's a too-easy conclusion to a too-easy play. -- David Barbour