'Love, Love, Love': A Fine Play About Some Very Unlikeable People -- A Theatre Review

It is London, the late 1960s with the Beatles gaining the world stage along with sex, drugs and other forms of rock and roll. And a new generation, the Baby Boomers, is coming into its own – in more ways than one.

Baby Boomers were born after WW II and before 1964. Until recently, they were the largest population in the US (but now surpassed by the Millennials). While I was born as the war was ending I certainly did not miss the ‘60s, growing up in NYC and going to City College in Manhattan. I lived that era and have been a witness to the passage of time and the life course of its constituents and their children.

But after seeing, Love, Love, Love, in New York during its previews by The Roundabout Theatre Company, written by Mike Bartlett and directed by Michael Mayer, I realize I have missed what was so wrong about the era instead remembering fondly its spirit of protest and iconoclasm. Tom Wolfe called the Boomers the “me generation” and Christopher Lasch called this the “culture of narcissism”.

Love, Love, Love, of course a reference and homage to the Beatles, is set in three acts. It follows an educated, urban British couple, starting in the ‘60s and onto their family of four about two decades later. It concludes some 20 years after that. The staging, true to each period, provides a wonderful visual backdrop for each of the periods, as well as displaying the progressive accumulation of wealth and privilege.

As 19 year olds on summer holiday from Oxford, Kenneth and Sandra have a chance encounter that sweeps them away into their high end dissolution. Kenneth (Richard Armitage, now enjoying an earned success on stage, film and TV) betrays his brother Henry (Alex Hurt), as does Sandra (Amy Ryan, a veteran of Broadway, on and off, film and TV, including The Office, In Treatment, and The Wire), a free spirit dating Henry. After all, love is all there is, and it calls for adventure, consideration of others notwithstanding. High on pot and rock and roll they set off to live their fantasy lives, or so they imagine. They were not very likeable as late adolescents, and it gets worse.

In the second act, we next see Kenneth and Sandra as prosperous professionals vaingloriously pursuing their careers and with two teenage children, Jamie (Ben Rosenfield) and Rose (Zoe Kazan). The parents are both working and making plenty, looking very stylish and enjoying their drinks, while their kids go to prep school and are at the neglected end of parenting. Kenneth and Sandra are truly oblivious of their children and, of course, each other. The playwright has made them quite unappealing despite their looks, and Armitage and Ryan are terrific in creating a subtle abhorrence that the audience is meant to feel.

The third act fast forwards to Kenneth recently retired, now quite well healed and living in what looks like a suburban mini-estate with Sandra living elsewhere since they are divorced. Jamie has moved in with his pal of a dad, and they are enjoying some quality pub time together. Jamie also has become quite dysfunctional, for unclear reasons that may have to do not just with his upbringing but his likely abundant use of intoxicants. Rose is 37, stuck in an unrewarding and poorly paying job, and single. In other words, Jamie is having a good old, careless time and Rose is miserable. Sandra continues to look gorgeous despite her years and the effects of a steady diet of alcohol – but maybe that’s because she never misses her routine in the gym? The whole lot of them are quite unlikeable as they dedicate themselves to their respective self-centeredness.

Wealth, which has been accumulated by Kenneth and Sandra, is on display. But it is not passed onto their progeny, who are short of opportunities in jobs and housing - and scrambling (at least Rose is) to try to find meaning, purpose and security. We are brought face to face with the inequity we see today in standards of living and prospects for the future even for those with a college educations, which in the distant past just about assured a good career. We witness the consequences of the seeds laid down by the “culture of narcissism”, and how it has played itself out in Western societies like our own. The kids have inherited the entitlement of their parents and little else, leaving them lost, needy and bitter.

Mike Bartlett, the British playwright of this show, was born in 1980 and educated at Oxford. He has no mercy for the likes of his characters, and eviscerates them with a very sharp literary blade. He is a prolific and award winning writer, with five other plays already published and performed, and a stage adaption of Chariots of Fire. The Boomer generation is clearly a terrain he knows well; he is of the age that his parents and their contemporaries were members of that era, and your guess is as good as mine as to what they may have been like.

Love may still be the answer, but don’t think this play will make the case for it. Yet if you want a fine play about some very dislikeable people as well as a highly informed history and sociology lesson neatly delivered as stage entertainment give Love, Love, Love a chance.

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My new book, Improving Mental Health: Four Secrets in Plain Sight, Foreword by Patrick Kennedy, will be available this November, 2016.

The opinions expressed herein are solely my own as a psychiatrist and public health advocate and public health doctor.