The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Atlantic Theater Company’s Let’s Love
By Ross
A bar with two seats and a piano sit on a bare stage, promising intimacy but lacking the warmth that one might expect from a play called Let’s Love. And then the sound of an orchestra warming up leads a top hat, tuxedo-wearing cabaret singer onto the Atlantic Theater Company‘s stage, crooning a love song about the overrated pleasure of love, and somehow, within that first song, we start to see what’s at the core of Let’s Love!, a new play by Ethan Coen. Directed with wit and force by Neil Pepe, and with a strong cast led by the ever-watchable Aubrey Plaza, the unwrapping starts with a promise to explore “love in all its miserable glory,” and we sit back with high expectations for an evening of sharp, chaotic hilarity and possibly some insight. But instead, what unfolds is an oddly bloodless affair. It’s stylish, clever, and intermittently funny, but rarely does it feel alive. For a play about passion and confusion, Let’s Love! feels strangely detached, as though it’s studying human connection through a plastic glass filled with ice, gin, and a splash of tonic.
The first monologue, performed to perfection by a strongly focused female patron, played expertly by Mary McCann (ATC’s The Welkin), rides sexually smart and confident, drinking and driving into the state of attraction that becomes the vehicle this play hangs around in, slumped on a bar stool or an overstuffed couch. Structured as a trio of loosely connected one-act scenes, Coen’s comedy circles its subject with wry wit, rather than emotionally embracing it. We see glimpses of desire, jealousy, and betrayal through a series of well-paced vignettes that never quite deepen the story or uncover emotional insight.
There’s plenty of smart setup, with witty lines, strange encounters, and flashes of cynicism, but under those covers, there is very little that makes one want to linger or return to. The play feels like it’s a love’s greatest hits soundtrack for a nightclub singer at an old airport lounge, without ever finding connection to its very own song. Between each segment, the radiant Nellie McKay offers those cabaret interludes as both commentary and some sort of connective tissue, which unfortunately stalls the meagre momentum, while also being almost more emotional than the whole ride. Her languid, wry delivery engulfs the evening with its most coherent rhythm, even if her presence also underscores how little warmth or spontaneity exists in the scenes themselves.
“I brake for no reason,” one says to the other, unveiling a vulnerability that the previous scenes struggled to authentically deliver, but the ensemble, to their credit, is fully invested in each unraveling. Plaza (off-Broadway’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea) exudes her trademark mix of poise and deadpan irony, though she’s too often left to coast a bit too long on that familiar persona. Chris Bauer (“Fellow Travelers“) as ‘Tough’ and DJ Wilson (off-Broadway’s Hold on to Me Darling) as ‘Dan’ lend a refreshing hint of naturalism, while Dylan Gelula (“Hacks“) as ‘Girl’, and Noah Robbins (MTC’s Purlie Victorious) as ‘Howie/The Boy’ spark different tones in their offbeat duet of attraction. Together, they bring flashes of authenticity and timing that suggest a much more human play hovering beneath the irony. Each actor lands within Coen’s fragmented world with clarity and conviction, yet it’s their grounded work, more than the script, that keeps the audience searching for connection. You get the sense that this group of talented performers is trying with all their might to will the play into meaning, when each isolated moment suggests that a larger truth is just on the other side of that door.
Director Pepe (Broadway’s American Buffalo) keeps the production rotating and revolving briskly, spinning us from apartment to bar to bedroom on Riccardo Hernandez’s fascinatingly barren set. But the motion can’t disguise the static pulse underneath. Reza Behjat’s lighting gleams, Peggy Schnitzer’s costumes nod at retro glamour, yet all that polished atmosphere feels sealed off from the heart. The jokes land, the scenes end, and the turntable spins again, yet the irony begins to feel less like wit and more like armour.
In that final rotation, featuring an offbeat connection and a delirious reminder of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” Let’s Love offers a flash of what this playful, biting, and even a little romantic play could have been. But it’s too fleeting. It’s an echo of a good idea; a concept so pleased with its own detachment that it forgets the messy, combustible feeling it set out to capture. What’s missing is a connective thread, the kind that might draw these vignettes together into a more meaningful whole. Something closer to the intertwined circle of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde (1897), which used ten separate encounters to expose not just desire, but the way each touch and interaction reverberates through society’s classes and constraints around love, sex, and attraction. Coen’s version flirts with that idea, but never commits to the continuity that would make the chaos resonate. For a play about the complexities of love, Let’s Love! ends up curiously loveless. It’s all surface charm and winking self-awareness, an ironic shrug in the shape of a valentine.
