LUV

LUV takes place on a suspension bridge, where three friends turn their existential woes into a neuroses of Vaudevillian proportions. Harry Berlin is a beatnik who has sunk so low he has no future except to jump off the bridge and is about to do so when Milt Manville comes along and intervenes. Milt and Harry turn out to be college classmates. As Harry, in his rags, reveals the depth of his despair Milt, a picture of prosperity, is all sympathy and then confesses that he too is full of frustration, because his wife won’t divorce him so he can marry the woman he loves. Then Milt’s wife, Ellen, appears and a triangle of the absurd ensues in the tradition of all great comedy that revels in alienation, the loss of identity, inability to communicate, self expression and the meaninglessness of it all. Originally staged in 1964, it was the second longest running comedy of it’s era.