Love, Love, Love
This is not a review. I saw the first preview of Love, Love, Love, and a review wouldn't be appropriate. However, the show is already in excellent shape, and quite interesting, and completely worth writing about. Take my random natterings with a extra-large grain of salt, and beware: there will be spoilers.




Love, Love, Love is by Mike Bartlett, whose King Charles III was downright thrilling. It follows a couple of remarkably self-centered people from their meet-not-so-cute in the 1960s (Act I) through their marriage and life with teenaged children (Act II) to their retirement years (Act III). If drama is about people learning or growing or changing, this is not a drama, although parts are quite moving. If comedy is about laughing at people who neither learn nor grow nor change, it's definitely a comedy. And parts are quite funny.

In Act I, we meet our protagonists Kenneth and Sandra. They see themselves as free spirits, which allows them to get together while she is on a date with his brother Henry. They believe that "we're going to die" is justification for doing whatever they want whenever they want.

By Act II, they have somehow ended up in the suburbs, well-off, with demanding jobs. But they still fancy themselves free spirits, which includes some breathtakingly bad parenting. This section is simultaneously really ugly and really funny.

In the third act, their now-37-year-old daughter Rose accuses them of being hypocrites, of being responsible for Thatcher, of buying rather than changing the world, and of ending up full of themselves rather than full of the love, love, love extolled by the Beatles. I think Bartlett may mean this as an indictment of Baby Boomers, and it does have some truth; however, if he means Ken and Sandra to represent the entire generation, he's way off-base and completely unfair. The Baby Boomers (of whom I am one) have a lot to answer for, but Ken and Sandra are pathological narcissists who destroy everything in their path.

Bartlett so wants Rose to be his mouthpiece that he loses track of her as a character. If he had given her one redeeming feature, that would have helped. If he had given her a speech focusing on her parents' personal shortcomings, that would have helped. Had she said, "You two never paid any attention to me, you were terrible parents, you never listened, you were completely unsupportive," she would have been telling the truth, and it would have been satisfying for the audience. Instead, she does her political spiel, which is weird. Is Bartlett trying to give the play some weight? It doesn't work.

Rose then focuses on Ken and Sandra's having been too supportive of her violin playing even though she was second rate; she now regrets her musical career and she blames it on them. But they don't give her enough attention to affect her choice of breakfast, let alone her career path. And when Ken says that she wasn't supposed to listen to them, that she was supposed to rebel, he makes more sense than she does. The klutziness of her attack lets her parents off the hook, which isn't fair.

The (deliberate?) irony of Love, Love, Love is that pathological narcissists can be so much more entertaining than their legitimately aggrieved victims. Ken and Sandra are awful, awful people. They pretty much destroy their children. But you'd rather spend time with them than poor sulky Rose.

I have strongly mixed feelings about Love, Love, Love. I admire its energy, humor, momentum, and depiction of character, but I don't think I actually liked it much. Yet I'm glad I saw it.

The play is enhanced by strong direction by Michael Mayer and an excellent cast. Amy Ryan is deliciously despicable as Sandra; it's the most interesting part and the most demanding. She has to age from 19 to her early 60s (I think), and she has as much dialogue as the rest of the cast combined. She gives a tour de force performance without ever detracting from the ensemble. Even when you most want to slap her, you kinda like her. Impressive! Richard Armitage is charming as Ken and manages to seem somewhat less selfish than Sandra, even though he is completely, horribly her equal. Alex Hurt is subtle and stolid as poor Henry, powerless against his brother's cheerful manipulations. Ben Rosenfield is heartbreaking as Ken and Sandra's son Jamie. And Zoe Kazan is excellent as poor Rose; I doubt it's easy to spend an entire show whimpering, but she does it quite effectively.

Wendy Caster
(5th row orchestra on the side; tdf ticket

The Maxamoo Podcast Previews October Theatre Beyond Broadway

Oct 5
9:02 AM
2016

Prepping for an Outrageous October Beyond Broadway at the Theater in New York City

David (@itsdlevy), Jack (@jackinbrooklyn) and Lindsay (@lindsaybarenz) tell us what they're looking forward to at the theater beyond Broadway in New York City in October.

Shows Discussed:

Love, Love, Love by Mike Bartlett at Roundabout

Vietgone by Qui Nguyen at MTC

The Harvest by Sam Hunter at Lincoln Center

My Name is Gideon: I'm Probably Going to Die Eventually by Gideon Irving

Duat by Daniel Alexander Jones from Soho Rep

Theater review: Love, Love, Love makes us swoon from the 1960s to today

By David Cote Posted: Wednesday October 19 2016, 4:42pm


Love repeats in different forms in this structurally tidy yet emotionally messy new play by Mike Bartlett (King Charles III), which tracks 44 years between Kenneth (Richard Armitage) and Sandra (Amy Ryan). These randy Brits hook up in 1967 London, with the Beatles regnant and a cultural youthquake promising enlightenment and sexual liberation. After the first intermission, flash forward 23 years to Thatcherite England. Parents to two confused and miserable teens, Sandra and Kenneth are still prone to hedonistic self-delusion, they’re just a bit nastier now. Come the last act, set in 2011, do we really expect anyone to have grown?

Although it may sound overly schematic in print, the psychocultural history mapped by Love, Love, Love is filled with interesting detours and switchbacks, abundant humor and a refusal (mostly) to condemn baby boomers outright. True, many Generation Xers will nod vigorously when Rose (Zoe Kazan), Kenneth and Sandra’s 37-year-old daughter — unmarried, childless and financially strapped — demands that they buy her a house, since they control all the money. As the sozzled and bemused Kenneth sputters, “You’re supposed to rebel. That’s what you’re supposed to do.” One generation’s bohemian counterculture becomes the starvation economy of the next.

Michael Mayer’s fine-tuned and nicely balanced production shows off five actors in top form. Armitage, a fantasy-film icon from his lead role in the Hobbit trilogy, is superb as the charming yet craven Kenneth. Ryan is all steel and sparks as the cruelly vivacious Sandra. Kazan does some of her best work in a long time, turning a whiny neurotic nearly into the play’s moral center. It’s a testament to Bartlett’s clever, incisive dialogue that such selfish, limited people should steal our hearts.


Laura Pels Theatre (Off Broadway). By Mike Bartlett. Directed by Michael Mayer. With Richard Armitage, Amy Ryan, Alex Hurt, Ben Rosenfeld, Zoe Kazan. Running time: 2hrs 10mins. Two intermissions. Through Dec 18. Click here for full ticket and venue information.

Follow David Cote on Twitter: @davidcote

Review: In ‘Love, Love, Love,’ All You Need Is Selfishness.
NYT Critics’ Pick
By BEN BRANTLEY
OCTOBER 19, 2016
Now here’s a couple who know how to grow old in style. Portraying a pair of soul mates in selfishness in Mike Bartlett’s “Love, Love, Love,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Laura Pels Theater, Amy Ryan and Richard Armitage advance from the ages of 19 to 64 with a galloping satirical wit that pulls you along, happy and appalled, through the decades.

Not that Kenneth (Mr. Armitage) and Sandra (Ms. Ryan) are easy to like, much less love. True, they appear to feel something like real affection for each other. But don’t expect them to think too much about the problems of anybody else, including their own children, or to suffer those who come between them and their creature comforts.

Such is the nature of two Grade-A examples of the idealists who came of age in the 1960s, those bright young things bent on ushering in a new era of peace, love, freedom and happiness. Or, to use the term most commonly applied to this now graying band of flower children, the baby boomers.

“Love, Love, Love” is a none-too-subtle indictment of a generation from the protean British author of more ambitious (and better) works as varied as the brilliant future-history play “King Charles III,” and the ruthless “Cockfight Play,” which presented the romantic triangle as a gladiator fight. Starting with its title — taken from the opening chant of the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” — this play rumbles with a sometimes too easy irony. It presents the archetypal likes of Kenneth and Sandra as “careless people” in the mode of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from “The Great Gatsby,” insular solipsists who never register the havoc they wreak in their pursuit of pleasure.

And yet I have to admit I had a swell time at “Love, Love, Love,” a Roundabout Theater Company production, impeccably directed by Michael Mayer and featuring a nigh-perfect five-member ensemble rounded out by Alex Hurt, Ben Rosenfield and Zoe Kazan. That’s partly because Mr. Bartlett’s heat-seeking intelligence can’t help locating the telling and authentic emotional detail even within caricature. And there’s pleasure to be derived in a comedy as scrupulously and symmetrically assembled as this one is.
But the greatest joy in “Love, Love, Love” comes from the chance it affords its stars to conquer the aging process and to demonstrate how people change — or more to the point, remain themselves — over the years. It’s a challenge to which Mr. Armitage, in his New York debut, and Ms. Ryan rise with blissful dexterity. They have been given the expected period-defining costumes (by Susan Hilferty) and hair styles, but it’s their postures and poses that most evocatively place them in time.

We first see their characters as Oxford students on summer break in London in 1967, in the grotty flat of Kenneth’s brother, Henry (Mr. Hurt, wonderfully resentful), filled with a heady sense of license and the smugness that comes from being 19 in a decade when youth was the supreme virtue. “Young people, our age, we’re the moment,” trills Sandra.
The second act, set in 1990, finds them as the parents of two teenage children, Rose and Jamie (Ms. Kazan and Mr. Rosenfield), in their comfortably appointed home in a middle-class suburb of London. Progress being what it is here, the third act takes place in 2010, in even more luxurious digs. (Derek McLane did the spot-on sets.)

Though it’s Henry whom Sandra has come to visit in the first scene, it’s the younger, more malleable Kenneth for whom she immediately feels an affinity. Wearing a Mondrian-print, Yves Saint Laurent-style dress and, by her own delighted admission, stoned to the gills, Ms. Ryan’s Sandra exudes a sensuous, dithery confidence that is silly, pretentious and absolutely commanding.

And the way she walks! Her gait combines the uncertainty of the perpetually inebriated with an angular, stalking purposefulness that persists long after Sandra, who becomes a successful career woman, has swapped weed for wine. Ms. Ryan, known for intense stage (“Detroit,” “A Streetcar Named Desire”) and film (“Gone Baby Gone”) work, gives a smashing comic performance that never stoops to excess in presenting an excessive character.
Mr. Armitage is just as good, capturing the passivity of a man who both resents and enjoys being led by a streamlined bulldozer. Best known as the mighty Thorin Oakenshield in the “Hobbit” movies, this English actor was also the best John Proctor I have ever seen, in Yael Farber’s production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” at the Old Vic in London. Here he tones down his natural intensity to remind us that the seemingly soft, spineless and charming can be as damaging, in their way, as two-fisted bullies.

For Mr. Bartlett makes it clear that Sandra and Kenneth’s relationship racks up serious casualties. And Mr. Hurt, Mr. Rosenfield and Ms. Kazan are superb in registering the damage inflicted.

Watch Mr. Hurt’s gruff, stoical Henry realizing that his girl has ditched him for his brother, with just a flicker of humiliation. Listen to Ms. Kazan’s alternately whiny and accommodating Rose deploying in vain every stratagem possible to capture her parents’ attention, or Mr. Rosenfield’s 14-year-old Jamie shutting down into numbed oblivion in the middle of a family firestorm.

Mr. Mayer (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “Spring Awakening”) shows a keen eye for the patterns of domestic dysfunction, and the sight of Kenneth and his son as startled mirror images across a dinner table is priceless.

“All we’re asking for is some humanity, is some freedom, is to throw off everything that holds us down and explore what we could do instead,” says the 19-year-old Sandra. It could be said that her wish is fulfilled, except for possibly the humanity part. Freedom, it seems, is just another word for taking care of yourself.

Mr. Bartlett isn’t about to let Sandra and Kenneth off the hook for their self-centeredness, in what is a deeply judgmental play. “There she is safe and sound, but a trail of destruction in her wake, no doubt,” says Kenneth as Sandra arrives late from a pub for a family conference. “That about sums her up.” There’s warmth and admiration in his voice, though, and watching Ms. Ryan and Mr. Armitage, we may even share his feelings, despite ourselves.

Love Love Love review – Richard Armitage captivates in baby boomer indictment
4 / 5 stars

Roundabout Theatre Company, New York
Two narcissistic 60s children go to war with their disgruntled offspring in Mike Bartlett’s hilarious and scathing state-of-the-nation family play
All you need is love,” the Beatles suggest. But money is helpful, so are the comforts of the welfare state. A psychology that makes a virtue of selfishness doesn’t hurt either. Mike Bartlett’s comic tragedy – or possibly tragic comedy – Love Love Love is a state-of-the-nation play disguised as a family play. Then again, maybe it’s the other way around. Though slighter than his last work, King Charles III, it’s a scathing, occasionally sidesplitting and not precisely subtle indictment of the baby boomer generation and the havoc it has heedlessly wrought.

The play begins in 1967 when the Oxford students Sandra (a ferociously good Amy Ryan) and Kenneth (Richard Armitage, making a captivating New York debut) meet in London. Sandra is the girlfriend of Henry (Alex Hurt), Kenneth’s working-class brother. Kenneth is staying rent-free in Henry’s slightly grotty flat. But this doesn’t stop them snogging. “Sometimes you have to do what feels right,” says Sandra, with all the egotism of the young.


Swinging: Richard Armitage, Amy Ryan and Alex Hurt play their characters in the 60s. Photograph: Joan Marcus
In the next act, set in 1990, with Sandra and Ken married and living in the suburbs. Their narcissism is still in full flower, much to the detriment and dismay of their children, Rose (Zoe Kazan) and Jamie (Ben Rosenfield). “We’re entitled to do our own thing, follow our own path, no one can tell us what’s right,” says the adult Sandra. Her wilting children can’t oppose her. In the final act, set in 2011, all is, once again, vanity.

Bartlett occasionally comes at his social and political argument too directly, as in a speech in the final act in which Rose complains, “You didn’t change the world, you bought it. Privatised it. What did you stand for? Peace? Love? Nothing except being able to do whatever the fuck you wanted.” But he leavens his argument with a lot of nasty humor and is very good at showing the destruction a careless remark or action can inflict. (One hopes he is an only child, because he has a particular knack for detailing the ways siblings can wound each other.)

The director, Michael Mayer (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, American Idiot), has encouraged his cast to enjoy the cruelty, purposeful and accidental, of these characters, without apologizing for them. Ryan’s Sandra, her jaws agape as though she’d like to devour the world, is a particular pleasure, and Armitage uses his grin and long, bendy limbs to show how Kenneth often sidesteps responsibility. As their unhappy daughter, Kazan, a black-clad sack of wretchedness, plays Rose’s misery with brio. Together the ensemble joins to create one of the most indelibly and viciously failed families to grace the contemporary stage. We Can Work it Out is one song these characters won’t be singing.

Off Broadway Review: ‘Love, Love, Love’ With Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan

Marilyn Stasio
Theater Critic
OCTOBER 19, 2016 | 07:00PM PT
Mike Bartlett’s play “Love, Love, Love,” now playing at the Roundabout Theater Company, takes an amused (and slightly horrified) look at the boomer generation as it arrogantly positions itself at the center of the universe from the 1960s to the present day. A cross between Joe Orton and Kenneth Lonergan, this snappy satire follows the adventures of a young British couple (Amy Ryan and Richard Armitage) as they meet in swinging London and follow their bliss to 2011, birthing and discarding emotionally stunted offspring along the way. As Bartlett (“King Charles III”) tells it, with searing insight and mocking wit in a flawless production directed by Michael Mayer, this was the generation that grabbed everything with both hands — and then ate their young.

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The adventures of Kenneth (“The Hobbit” actor Armitage, born to play comedy) and Sandra (Ryan, sublimely witty) begin in 1967, when young people could taste the changes in the air. “The laws are constantly being overthrown,” Kenneth announces, “the music’s exploding, the walls collapsing.” Sandra couldn’t agree more. “The world’s going to be a different place in ten years,” she predicts. And off they go into that brave new world.


By 1990, when they’re both 43, Kenneth and Sandra have married and produced two teenage children, smart and sensitive Rose (Zoe Kazan) and weird Jamie (Ben Rosenfield). “You’re supposed to be rejecting your parents, it’s an important part of growing up,” Sandra lectures her passive children. She and Kenneth have yet to outgrow the sense of entitlement conferred by the permissive society they grew up in. Sandra has a power job and is so self-absorbed that she keeps forgetting she has children. Kenneth seems a bit more responsible, but they’re both having affairs. “We both feel trapped” is how Sandra expresses their discontent.

Despite a divorce, Kenneth and Sandra are still friendly in 2011, when they meet at the funeral of Kenneth’s brother. They’re both in other relationships, but even at 64, the sparks are still there. They scarcely pay attention when Rose finally stands up for herself.

“I’m nearly 40 and I’ve got nothing,” she says. And it’s all her parents’ fault for bringing her up according to their own selfish values, instead of giving her realistic guidance. While she’s at it, Rose trashes their entire generation, which “voted in Thatcher, destroyed the unions, reduced taxes,” and is now hell-bent on poisoning the environment while living off their cushy pensions.

Locked in their own aura, Kenneth and Sandra still see themselves as 60s rebels. They don’t even hear poor Rose when she says: “You didn’t change the world. You bought it.”

‘Love, Love, Love’ Theater Review: Richard Armitage, Amy Ryan Bond With the Beatles

Mike Bartlett follows “King Charles III” with another comedy, this one spanning nearly half a century of indulgent lives
Robert Hofler | October 19, 2016 @ 5:00 PM
love love love armitage any ryan
Photo: Joan Marcus
Give or take a couple of years, Richard Armitage goes from 20 to 40 to 60 in the course of Mike Bartlett’s new three-act comedy, “Love, Love, Love,” which opened Wednesday at Roundabout’s Off Broadway Laura Pels Theatre. It’s hard to say what’s more astounding — that Armitage (he plays Thorin Oakenshield in “The Hobbit” trilogy) is utterly convincing at each age in each act, or that someone has written a three-act play in an era of 80-minute divertissements?

Before you panic at having to endure some Eugene O’Neill marathon, “Love, Love, Love” comes in at just over two hours and it’s very funny. While there are two intermissions, they’re needed to establish three very different British interiors, each of which set designer Derek McLane renders in careful detail.

Armitage makes his New York stage debut, and he’s spectacular. His callow-but-always-charming Kenneth meets his future wife, Sandra (Amy Ryan), shortly after the Beatles have released their 1967 single “Love, Love, Love,” and they fall in love (more likely it’s lust) dancing to the tune in the apartment of his older brother, Henry (Alex Hurt), who’s dating Sandra at the time. Needless to say, we never see Henry again until act three, and then in a very different form.

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'The Cherry Orchard' Broadway Review: Diane Lane Stars in an Overripe Revival

“Love, Love, Love” tracks Kenneth and Sandra’s relationship with each other, as well as their two children (Zoe Kazan and an effectively unhinged Ben Rosenfield). It’s not inappropriate to compare Bartlett’s play with last season’s breakthrough “The Humans,” which also opened under the auspices of the Roundabout at the Pels Theatre.

Michael Mayer‘s direction is much bouncier than Joe Mantello’s staging of the Stephen Karam play. Ryan brings a real “Ab Fab” flair to Sandra. She’s not quite as successful as Armitage in playing the younger version of her character, but then he’s not required to answer to “bird” and wear a Mary Quant mini-dress knockoff (costumes by Susan Hilferty).

Mayer’s manic brand is much less effective with the introduction of Kazan’s teenage Rose in the second act. From the beginning, she should be the eye in this family storm, but her tragedy is played for broad laughs. When we meet her again at age 37 in act three, her situation doesn’t deliver the necessary resonance.



Bartlett is writing about Britain, not America, but his thesis that the aging flower children squandered everything and left nothing for their kids misses a generation. Those who came of age in the late 1960s inherited their parents’ wealth and then spent it.

While the Kazan character bemoans her parents’ generation (she delivers the play’s funniest line), it’s intriguing to compare Rose to the lead character in David Hare’s “Plenty,” now starring Rachel Weisz at the Public Theater. Susan Traherne, the age of what would be Rose’s grandparents, feels cheated by post-World War II Britain. In the end, every generation has something to bitch about.

Considering what happens to Kenneth and Sandra’s children in act three, “Love, Love, Love” is nearly as grim as Hare’s take on life (and maybe darker than even Karam’s). Mayer and Bartlett, to their credit, keep Kenneth and Sandra completely oblivious to that fact.

Richard Armitage shows impressive range in his US theatrical debut Love, Love, Love


Richard Armitage, Amy Ryan and Alex Hurt in Love, Love, Love
Tom Wicker
20 OCTOBER 2016 • 3:00AM
Richard Armitagehit the big time in 2012 when he starred as dwarf prince Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson’s lavish film adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. But in the UK, Armitage had made waves as a heart-throb for hire (with a sizeable online fanbase), playing the object of Dawn French’s affections in The Vicar of Dibley and brooding MI5 agent Lucas North in Spooks.

In 2014, he earned an Olivier nomination for his performance as John Proctor in a critically acclaimed staging of The Crucible at London’s Old Vic, with Telegraph critic Charles Spencer stating that Armitage was “an exhilarating stage actor, with blazing eyes and a righteous fury about him”.


Here, he takes centre stage in this off-Broadway debut of writer (and fellow Brit) Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love, a timely shot across the bow at the baby boomer generation who here have taken advantage of the property boom and squeezed their kids out of the market in the process.

In Love, Love, Love, which spans three time periods, Armitage plays Kenneth. We first meet him as an Oxford University student freeloading off his brother in London before running off with his girlfriend, Sandra (Amy Ryan). They marry, have children and never stop putting themselves first.

Bartlett charts the devastating consequences of the baby boomers’ “me, me, me” attitude – starting in 1967, on the night The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ was broadcast as part of a worldwide television event. By the end of the play, that song’s seemingly harmless message has become horribly curdled.

Armitage shows impressive range as he ages Kenneth upwards, channelling his hawkish charisma into more darkly funny places than his screen roles allow. He’s a louche, petulant but winningly playful 19-year-old, an exasperated working father of two and, finally, a smugly retired businessman, cracking open expensive wine while his resentful daughter struggles to pay her rent.


However, Love, Love, Love – which debuted at the Royal Court in 2010 – lacks the finesse of Bartlett’s recent work, such as the Shakespeare-inflected Charles III, which made its Broadway debut last year.

Here, things shift awkwardly into serious gear in the final act. Also, while Ryan is bitterly hilarious as Sandra, delivering crushing putdowns in a sing-song voice, her character gets few of the glimpses of humanity granted to Kenneth. A late-stage speech about the difficulty of being a woman in the workplace doesn’t fully rectify this.


Nevertheless, Bartlett’s writing – driven by the breathlessly hysterical tone of director Michael Mayer’s production – is savagely and relentlessly funny in Kenneth and Sandra’s scenes with their kids. He skewers the effect of the couple’s vapid ethos of self-fulfilment on a generation primed for a fall, misled into expecting more than their parents have left for them.

Love, Love, Love is at a Roundabout production for the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre runs until December 18. Tickets: 212.719.1300; http://www.roundabouttheatre.org/Shows- ... -Love.aspx

Love, Love, Love': What Happens When Boomers Have Babies?

By Robert Kahn
Have a Drink with Amy Ryan in Acidic 'Love, Love, Love'



THE-SCENE
'Love, Love, Love': What Happens When Boomers Have Babies?

By Robert Kahn
Have a Drink with Amy Ryan in Acidic 'Love, Love, Love'Joan Marcus
Amy Ryan has a drink or seven, alongside Zoe Kazan. The pair play mother and daughter in Roundabout's New York premiere of the Mike Bartlett comedy "Love, Love, Love."
Let’s begin with a simple observation about the new Roundabout dark comedy “Love, Love, Love”: Not since George and Martha drained gin by the bottle in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” has quite so much liquor been consumed on a stage.
Most of the boozing in this acidic and absorbing New York premiere from quick-witted Brit playwright Mike Bartlett (“King Charles III”) is done by Amy Ryan, the Oscar and two-time Tony Award nominee, as a carefree student and, later, parent, named Sandra.
In Bartlett’s three-act, two-intermission play—directed by Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening,” etc.)—Sandra ages 40 years, but the drinking never stops. She makes Martha look like a teetotaler.
“Love, Love, Love” is a surprising piece with an unusual structure, anchored by a reliance on popular music of the generations it depicts. Beatlemania is a subtext in the first act, which ends without any real clue about where Bartlett is going (comedy? drama?) or which characters are coming back.
At first it seems our focus will be on Henry (Alex Hurt, of Lincoln Center’s “Dada Woof…”), a stern laborer anticipating a date with Sandra. Henry is letting kid brother Kenneth (Richard Armitage) crash at his flat, and Kenneth doesn’t want to leave just because Henry’s having a girl over.
Older brother’s worst fears materialize when he steps out for a few minutes and returns to find Kenneth and Sandra in an embrace.
The next act flashes forward 20 years. Kenneth and Sandra are married, with two teens, Jamie and Rose (Ben Rosenfield and Zoe Kazan), and a bad case of middle-age malaise. The third and final act brings mom and dad, now divorced, together again with the kids, another generation later.
So … is it better to be born smart, or lucky? That’s the question I found myself coming back to in the days after “Love, Love, Love,” which finally proves to be making a point—and asking hard questions—about entitlement, fortune and circumstance.
Neither Kenneth nor Amy are going to make it into Mensa, but their lives turned out OK. How much of that is simply a function of their times, when people could rely on pensions and golden handcuffs? Are their children, whose lives are far more stalled than the selfish parents, doomed to a more meager existence, simply by virtue of their birthdate?
And is it reasonable for the kids to be angry or aimless because of that?
Ryan is marvelous as a free-loving, free-wheeling adult who grows old, but doesn’t grow up. We should dislike Sandra. The woman feels no guilt about putting her own needs first in every relationship. But Ryan’s too good: She makes irresponsibility look interesting.
Armitage is charming as a slacker just a shade more self-aware than his wife. Kazan bubbles and boils as the only member of the family who worries about anything, and it’s her actions in the third act that tie things together and help distinguish “Love, Love, Love” from messier fare.
Scene designer Derek McLane nails the difficult task of making three static rooms exude the details of their respective decades. “Love, Love, Love” left me both amused, and consumed by thoughts about fortune and fate. This marks two seasons in a row with an engaging and fast-paced play by Mike Bartlett on our shores.
“Love, Love, Love,” through Dec. 18 at The Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, 111 W 46th St. Tickets: $88-$99. Call 212-719-1300.
Follow Robert Kahn on Twitter@RobertKahn
Published at 7:00 PM EDT on Oct 19, 2016 | Updated at 3:38 PM EDT on Oct 19, 2016

Love, Love, Love': Theater Review
6:00 PM PDT 10/19/2016 by Frank Scheck
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Courtesy of Joan Marcus
From left: Richard Armitage, Amy Ryan, Ben Rosenthal and Zoe Kazan in 'Love, Love, Love'
Superb acting enlivens this scathing theatrical examination of the baby boomer generation.
12/18/2016

Amy Ryan and Richard Armitage star in this drama by the Tony Award-nominated playwright of 'King Charles III,' chronicling the lives of a couple and their two children over several decades.
Baby boomers may wish to avoid Mike Bartlett's 2010 drama, which is receiving its New York premiere courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre Company. Depicting the shifting lives of a couple and their two children from the late 1960s to the present day, this work delivers a lacerating portrait of a terminally self-obsessed generation. But lest you think the playwright is being too harsh on them, rest assured that the millennial characters in Love, Love, Love aren't very appealing, either.

The playwright, Tony-nominated last season for his political fantasia, King Charles III, here manages the neat trick of making us relate to his characters while not particularly liking them. It's a testament to his gifts for incisive characterization, pungent comic dialogue and astute social commentary.

Despite its decades-long timeframe, nothing particularly dramatic occurs in the three-act play. The first part takes place in 1967 in the North London flat of 23-year-old Henry (Alex Hurt), who's just returned home after a hard day at work. His brother Kenneth (Richard Armitage), a university student on break, is absorbed in a live television broadcast featuring The Beatles. Henry is none too pleased to see his handsome younger brother lounging around half-naked, especially since his younger girlfriend, Sandra (Amy Ryan), is on her way.

READ MORE
Richard Armitage, Zoe Kazan, Amy Ryan Fall in 'Love, Love, Love'
When Sandra does arrive, it soon becomes clear that she and Kenneth are kindred free spirits. The physical attraction between them is palpable. When Henry goes out briefly to pick up some fish and chips, they get physical, fully aware, but not really caring, that Henry is bound to catch them.

The second act, set in 1990, reveals that the liaison was more than a fling. Sandra and Kenneth are now married and comfortably well-off, the parents of Rose (Zoe Kazan), who's about to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, and 14-year-old Jamie (Ben Rosenfeld). The charged interactions among the family members demonstrate that the marriage is on the skids and that they, as well as their children, can barely relate to one another.

By the time Kenneth and Sandra come together in the third act, set in 2011, their lives have been altered by death and divorce, though they still seem quite happy, even flirtatious with each other. But the children, now in their thirties, are the worse for wear. Slacker Jamie is obsessed with video games, and Rose, once an aspiring violinist, can barely support herself even while her parents live comfortably on their pensions. When they refuse to buy her a house, Rose responds bitterly, blaming them and their entire generation for her problems.

"You got your cheap flights and your nice cars but never looked at what they were doing to the environment, you hate immigrants, love The Daily Mail, voted in Thatcher, destroyed the unions, reduced taxes, Tony fucking Blair," she rants.


While American audiences may not fully appreciate some of the specific British references, they certainly will understand the sort of societal splits that can divide generations. And though Bartlett's younger characters come across as more than a little whiny, the playwright reserves his larger scorn for those members of the preceding generation that squandered the message implicit in the title — taken from The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" — in favor of selfishness and materialism. The indictment seems a bit too sweeping, but the arguments are entertaining.

The lead performers skillfully handle the difficult assignment of playing characters over several decades, even if they're not always fully convincing in every incarnation. Ryan, sporting a garish wig, may be straining to play the 19-year-Sandra, but she delivers such an emotionally vital performance throughout that it hardly matters. Armitage is excellent as well, while Hurt, Rosenfield and Kazan make vivid impressions in their less developed roles.

Director Michael Mayer's faultless staging of the complex, time-shifting proceedings is further enhanced by Derek McLane's multiple sets and Susan Hilfterty's period-perfect costumes.

By the end of the evening, you will inevitably have that famous Beatles refrain in your head. And while Love, Love, Love is not quite as profound as it intends to be, there's an awfully lot in it to, well, love.

Venue: Laura Pels Theatre, New York
Cast: Richard Armitage, Alex Hurt, Zoe Kazan, Ben Rosenfield, Amy Ryan
Playwright: Mike Bartlett
Director: Michael Mayer
Set designer: Derek McLane
Costume designer: Susan Hilferty
Lighting designer: David Lander
Sound designer: Kai Harada
Presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company