Love and Information

Minetta Lane Theatre, New York City

(800) 982-2787

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Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. “Make that 57 plays,” actually—because Love and Information actually strings together dozens of dramatic vignettes across two hours, using a cast of just 15 to portray more than 100 “questioning, frustrated, fascinating” characters. In such previous plays as 1982’s Top Girls and 1987’s Serious Money, Churchill has “proved herself without peer in creating expressly topical works in which form and function are one.” This time, the 75-year-old British playwright has outdone herself. Every scene—be it five seconds or five minutes long—addresses the way we crave information as a way to connect to one another and yet can’t always process the information we get. Likewise, the play itself “teases, thwarts, and gluts” its audience’s capacity to keep up.

Unfortunately, most every scene is “trite and unaffecting,” said Brendan Lemon in the Financial Times. Though the expert actors “seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely,” Churchill’s writing “never approaches anything very thoughtful; there isn’t time.” Every scene unfolds inside a large, open-faced cube lined with overscale graph paper, while “whiz-bang” stagecraft ensures rapid prop and actor swap-overs during each blackout. The tactic suits a bit about two working clowns discussing an affair. But even when a playlet touches on terrorism or terminal illness, “the treatment is glancing.” Indeed, “the slick flow of desultory conversations resembles nothing so much as walking down a big-city street and overhearing snatches of chat along the way: This one is talking about sex, that one is worried about cats,” and none of it can possibly do much to edify the eavesdropper.

Such complaints sell short the show’s many pleasures, said Jesse Green in New York magazine. “The staging is beautiful,” the dialogue astringent but knowing, and even the briefest dramas—including 10 seconds in which actress Maria Tucci seems to be a widow bagging her husband’s clothes—prove capable of cutting deeply. By the time I began to tire of abrupt blackouts, a larger theme had emerged to keep me engaged. Churchill appears to be puzzling through a single question about information’s place in love’s equations—namely, “how little knowledge is necessary, in the theater or in a relationship, to achieve coherence?” In the end, “her answer seems to be paradoxical: Not very much, and more than is ever available.”