Review: Ethan Coen Explores the Messiness of Romance in Let's Love!

Ethan Coen’s last two solo directorial film efforts, Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t!, were, to varying degrees, about characters navigating the messy complexities of romance. Now, with Let’s Love!, his latest trio of one-act comedies making its world premiere with the Atlantic Theater Company, he takes that subject on more directly. It’s too bad that the feeling of slightness that made those films dissolve from memory almost immediately has carried over to this new stage production, as well.

The evening gets off to an unfortunate start with a pair of monologues delivered by two people at a bar. A “Broad” (Mary McCann) drunkenly rambles on about her sexual glory days back in the 1960s, and the man (Dion Graham) sitting next to her delivers his own aria about the ravages of aging as he contemplates whether to engage the woman in a potential hookup.

One could justify the overextended nature of the Broad’s monologue, with the character repeating the same jokes ad infinitum, as reflective of the way she keeps trying to recreate the high points of her past. That doesn’t negate the fact that the segment loses its humor long before it comes to its exhausted stop. McCann valiantly tries to bring out the desperation underneath the character’s endless ramblings, while Reza Behjat adds to the melancholic feel with moody chiaroscuro lighting design on Riccardo Hernandez’s spare set.

If the first play is about aged characters struggling to find love, the concluding play chronicles the messy beginnings of a relationship. An awkward first date between a Boy (an endearingly awkward Noah Robbins) and a Girl (a winsome Dylan Gelula) climaxes in mortifying fashion with the Boy’s very public attack of food poisoning. In the next scene, during a conversation the Boy has with a colleague at work (Graham again), the Boy reveals that, amazingly, that didn’t faze the Girl and they hooked up back at her apartment afterward.

The fact that the Boy expresses discomfort in divulging the more explicit details of this initial sexual encounter, however, frustrates the colleague, who indignantly proclaims “Speech is how we conquer death” as a riposte to the Boy’s perceived prudishness. The final scene closes the play out in a wave of romantic affirmation while leaving the implications of the previous scene’s opposition between public and private discourse frustratingly up in the air.

The heart of Let’s Love! lies in its second, longest, and best play, a screwball farce revolving around two couples. Susan (Aubrey Plaza, tapping into the kind of extravagant irrationality that marked her recent screen performance in Megalopolis) is so angry in the wake of her break-up with Dan (CJ Wilson, playing sensitive to a fault) that she hires a man (Chris Bauer, offering a perfectly modulated caricature of machismo) to beat him up, and is even willing to have sex with him as part of his payment.

As the character details and plot twists pile up, it turns out that the man and Dan’s current girlfriend, Faye (Mary Wiseman), have something in common. The verbal wit familiar from both Coen’s own films and his many cinematic collaborations with his brother Joel sparkles the most here, with even the most seemingly insignificant of word usages leading into the zaniest of digressions. Less amusing is Coen’s rather sour treatment of the profanely outspoken Susan, who ends up paying for her live-wire volatility and retrograde notions of masculinity.

Director Neil Pepe has enlisted singer-songwriter Nellie McKay to offer her own sincere/ironic commentary in between the playlets with a combination of American songbook standards and original songs, with she and the entire cast joining together in a musical number at the end. Despite that wraparound device, though, Let’s Love! never quite adds up to more than the sum of its inconsistent parts. Though the plays’ backward progression from aged disillusionment to messy middle-aged exploration to youthful idealism is intriguing, one may still come away from this trio of divertissements hungry for meatier insights into romance in the contemporary age.