First Love

Tickets and Information

Thank God for actors. Without a transcendent lead female performance by Ruth Maleczech and a sturdy star turn by Frederick Neumann, Charles L. Mee's play First Love would have been no more than an intellectual exercise about the nature of romance. Not that the play isn't ambitious and often surprising, but a schematic, non-naturalistic approach to its subject matter argues against any emotional involvement on the part of the New York Theatre Workshop audience. Only the acting, which vaults over the limitations of the piece itself, makes one occasionally feel humanity peeking through the prose.

The title, First Love, suggests a story about young people; Mee's first surprise is that the tw[...]