Love and Information
Opening Night: February 19, 2014
Closing: March 23, 2014
Theater: Minetta Lane Theatre
Love and Information is a theatrical kaleidoscope exploring more than a hundred characters using wit, candor and nimble use of language as they try to make sense of what they find out.
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February 19, 2014
A man and a woman sit on a checkered blanket on a sunny afternoon in the park having a picnic of sorts, perhaps a first date. She’s drinking wine and doing all the talking as he sits listening, a bemused smile on his face. Gradually, his smile grows confused. "I hold the bird in my left hand and quickly cut off its head with a pair of scissors," she says as he goes pale, "and I drop the body in a bucket and take the head and peel back the skin and cut round the skull and there’s the brain…" Our man looks as though he’s about to run for the hills. Such is the nature of dating in 2014, a subject briefly touched upon in Love and Information, a play — if you can call it that — by Caryl Churchill, being presented courtesy of New York Theatre Workshop at the Minetta Lane Theatre.
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February 19, 2014
Minutes after getting home from Love and Information, the new Caryl Churchill play at the Minetta Lane, I found a piping-hot thread called “Love and Information Just Awful” on one of the theater chat boards. “What an excruciatingly boring evening,” wrote the virtual commenter. Respondents quickly chimed in to complain about the pretension and pointlessness of the play — if it was a play — and its likelihood of receiving raves (like this one) from critics. Nor was this strictly an online hate phenomenon. At the theater, even in the dark, I could see some people fuming, little clouds of blood-red hostility hovering over their heads and obscuring my view. (There were also walkouts.) I certainly recognized the feeling; how often have I fumed at what others were enjoying? It’s a scandal, the way people have different taste!
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 19, 2014
At the end of Caryl Churchill’s dazzling experimental play Love and Information, theatergoers have spent two hours watching 15 actors portray 100-plus characters in more than 60 scenes, some as short as a few seconds, none longer than a few minutes — each scene, no matter how brief, with its own costumes and props: Two characters elaborately dressed as Elvis Presley impersonators, both looking as if they stayed up too late and drank too much, slouch silently in their seats, until one says: “The difficulty of getting the Israelis and Palestinians to…” Blackout. That’s the whole scene. A woman tells a boy she is his mother, not his sister; they then argue whether he should tell his mother (actually his grandmother) that he now knows.
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February 19, 2014
Tell me. I want to know. I need to know. I have to know. Oh, I’m sorry you told me. I wish I didn’t know that. The impulses behind those sentences have animated every human being who has walked this planet. And the odds are that, in some form or another, those instincts percolate throughout your waking hours every day. It’s enough to keep any Homo sapiens’s head in full spin. Especially now, when the distribution and consumption of data have assumed the proportions of a Tower of Babel that seems ready to topple at any moment. Such is the dizzying premise behind Love and Information, the thought-churning, deeply poignant new play by Caryl Churchill, which opened on Wednesday night at the Minetta Lane Theater.
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February 19, 2014
Imagine that there is something wrong with your television that causes it to switch channels every minute. That, in a nutshell, is Love and Information, Caryl Churchill’s fast-paced, kaleidoscopic and absolutely infuriating new work. Not only is it an absolutely pointless, puzzling and pretentious bore, it runs two hours long without an intermission, making the play that much more painful.
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