THE STORY: Beane is an exile from life—an oddball. His well-meaning sister, Joan, and brother-in-law, Harry, try and make time for him in their busy lives, but no one can get through. Following a burglary on Beane’s apartment, Joan is baffled to find her brother blissfully happy and tries to unravel the story behind his mysterious new love, Molly. Funny, enchanting and wonderfully touching, John Kolvenbach’s offbeat comedy is a rhapsody to the power of love in all its forms.
“One of the best new plays of the year. Richly comic and deeply touching. Outstanding. A smashing, compassionate new play.” —The Telegraph (UK).
“John Kolvenbach’s American play is a Jungian comedy. It’s about how to find yourself, recreate, mutilate, enrich yourself. Within you, there’s someone else. It’s The Other: a belligerent liberator. Listen to its voice. Come out of your darkness. You’ll lose something but you’ll get a life. The writing is crisp, tough, undogmatic, menacingly funny. Strongly recommended, especially to those not afraid of the freedom of fantasy.” —The Times (London).
“What should be treasured most about John Kolvenbach’s play, LOVE SONG…is the fact that it is a work of, by and for the live stage. It is the stuff of pure theatre. Its language, relationships, imagery and overall world view are deeply rooted in the hothouse atmosphere of that most intimate and fantastical forum. As the title suggests, love is a major element in the equation: married love, imagined love, desperate love, withered love, love lost, love reborn, love as argument, love as phantasm, love as liberator, love as anarchic spark, love as sanity, love as self-knowledge, love as a gateway to the senses. But, of course, if love is in the picture, so are loneliness and a certain madness. Mix this all together and you’ve got a quite a volatile concoction. LOVE SONG is about nothing less than the chaos of being human, and the yearning for everything.” —Chicago Sun-Times.
