Theatre in Review: I Love You So Much I Could Die (New York Theatre Workshop)

	Mona Pirnot. Photo: Jenny Anderson

I Love You So Much I Could Die is an avant-garde work in reverse; instead of breaking new ground for more eloquent expression, writer/performer Mona Pirnot, aided by director Lucas Hnath, wraps herself in so many restrictions that her subject struggles to breathe. It offers one of the strangest setups this side of Samuel Beckett's Not I, in which the audience sees only the performer's mouth: Pirnot enters from the back of the house and takes her place onstage on a set, designed by Mimi Lien that consists of a table, chair, laptop, microphone, loudspeaker, and guitar stand. She sits with her back to the audience for the entire evening -- which, as it happens, is only sixty-five minutes long.

The text centers on a disaster that struck a member of Pirnot's family in the early days of the pandemic. She doesn't explicate what happened, describing its aftermath in only the most general terms. In any case, it has had a devastating effect, subjecting Pirnot to sleeplessness, depression, run-on thoughts, attacks of guilt, and an overall questioning of life's meaning. All of this is delivered not by her but via a text-to-speech tool; she hits a "go" button on her laptop and sits, facing upstage, while her words are delivered in a voice that eerily recalls Hal, the computer, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Well, the robots are coming everywhere else, so I suppose the theatre must get ready for them, too. But I Love You So Much I Could Die does little to advance their cause. At first, there's something mildly humorous about hearing the details of existential dread delivered in a tone that lacks the warmth of a telephone prompter telling you to push "one" for the company index. And when the text turns into a run-on mass of sentence fragments signaling a rush of unruly, impossible-to-process emotions, the tool's halting delivery plausibly suggests a mind coping with unbearable stress. It's possible that, combined with more conventionally engaging techniques, this technology might prove useful in certain situations.

But a gimmick is still a gimmick and, even with its ultra-brief running time, the show's setup yields diminishing returns, becoming actively tiresome before it is over. It also raises questions of appropriateness that aren't easily answered. Either to avoid seeming exploitative of her family's tragedy or because the experience is too painful to recount (or both), Pirnot's text omits most of the details. (In addition, reviewers have been asked not to discuss, or even refer to, entire passages of the text, out of respect for her relatives.) In a way, such delicacy is admirable; Pirnot has been through hell and her loved ones have the right to their privacy. But if the material is so, personal, leaving her feeling so fragile, one wonders about the necessity of putting it on display even in such a shrouded form.

Of course, trauma is the parent of a thousand plays. The horrific story of Tennessee Williams' sister Rose, subjected to a lobotomy and institutionalized for life, emerges, in coded form, time after time in his plays. Edward Albee's chilly, self-absorbed adoptive parents are reimagined in works ranging from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Three Tall Women. In recent months, artists ranging from Ryan J. Haddad to Alex Edelman to Rachel Bloom have mined dark humor out of their experiences with disability, antisemitism, and the pandemic. In contrast, the half-in/half-out approach devised by Pirnot and Hnath is unsatisfactory on several fronts; one feels discomfited by her self-exposure even as the production's withholding approach renders her suffering oddly generic.

Is it possible that Hnath, Pirnot's husband, wasn't the right artistic partner? Might another, more objective, director have pushed her harder to achieve greater specificity? We'll never know. Certainly, Hnath has experimented with technology onstage before, most notably the riveting Dana H. in which Deirdre O'Connell lip-synched to a tape of Hnath's mother recounting her harrowing experience as a hostage. But there was nothing coy about that piece; it faced its ugly facts head-on. The trouble with I Love You Much I Could Die is that it becomes almost entirely about its strange approach to storytelling; it is afflicted with a critical case of self-consciousness.

Admittedly, there is something eerie about sitting in New York Theatre Workshop, which, with a nearly bare stage, suddenly seems cavernous; Lien's spare design adds a touch of creeping unease to the proceedings. Oona Curley's lighting design consists of one long cue, smoothly executed, dimming the house lights slowly across the running time and ending in darkness. Enver Chakartash dresses Pirnot attractively, even if we don't get a good look at the designer's work until the curtain call. The sound design, by Mikhail Fiksel and Noel Nichols, allows for maximum intelligibility at all times.

I Love You So Much I Could Die seems almost engineered to launch a hundred think pieces about new technological trends in the theatre. But Pirnot doesn't make a very strong case for removing the basic human-to-human contact that remains the essence of the theatre experience. Interestingly, the piece most comes to life when, breaking her silence, she pauses the text, delivering songs that evoke a multitude of feelings without directly addressing the show's painful central subject. The finale, a haunting offering titled "74th Court," is so shot through with melancholy that it overshadows everything else. Perhaps Pirnot isn't fully leaning into her best talents; songwriting may be the ideal vehicle for what she wants to accomplish, allowing us better access to her experience. --David Barbour