Though the title “The Last of the Love Letters” could mean anything, the subtitle of Ngozi Anyanwu’s play-of-sorts is more specific: “A Meditation on Loneliness.”
It is now in a Crowded Fire Theater West Coast premiere that showcases the talents of actors and director.
Through two successive monologues, in which two apparently unrelated characters express their deepest thoughts and feelings about life and love, the playwright does indeed explore the many facets of loneliness. There are more causes for that existential condition than simply lost love, and more ways to express it—through dance, music, poetic text—than you’d think.
The action begins as an unnamed woman (“You” according to the program) rises from a bed and breaks into a sexy dance. She goes on to toy in an erotic way with an apple, and throughout her monologue at times addresses us, the audience, as though we are the lover she lost. Performer Farrah Hamzeh approaches the role with impressive variety: She teases, confronts, rages, goes deep inside.
“Can you love someone who does not know how to love?” she wonders. It’s a monologue in which “You” moves slowly into some sort of understanding of her own condition, and the extent to which the actual you can identify with her intimate confessions probably has to do with your own personal experiences in love, or your willingness to hear all about someone else’s pain.
Much longer and more complex is the second monologue (“You No. 2”), in which a male character (played by Gabriele Christian) is clearly in a psychiatric hospital. The transition between monologues is seamless, merely involving a paring-down of the appropriately plain set by Brendan Yungert.
Here, too, “You No. 2” is talking to a lost lover and to us simultaneously. “I think about you … all the time,” he says. “You’re probably not thinking about me.” As a psychatric patient, dancing, pleading, screaming and basically expressing every single emotion known to humankind, Christian is impressively varied and vulnerable in the role—so vulnerable that it almost makes you cringe with empathy, even embarrassment. “You made me nothing … an apparition,” he says plaintively. Presumably losing her made him lose his mind.
But in trying to encompass the most ineffable and universal truths of life and magnifying those truths—in trying too hard to involve us–Anyanwu has forfeited a certain clarity.
Despite the excellent acting, including hodari blue as a robotically impersonal hospital orderly, and Nailah Harper-Malveaux’s meticulous, detailed direction, it’s easy to admire the production, but hard to feel emotionally invested in it.
Crowded Fire Theater’s “The Last of the Love Letters” continues through May 3 at Z Below, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $25 to $100 at crowdedfire.org.