Love NYC Reviews and Tickets
Member Reviews (216)
See it if Plot is about family in poverty. Well acted, directed and staged.
Don't see it if The show is not uplifting and if you want a happy play, this isn't it.
See it if you don't mind watching solo acts of people cleaning toilets, buttering and eating bread etc. It's very well acted.
Don't see it if It's REALLY slow. The point is hinted at but the other 75 min out of the 90 are hard to get through,
See it if You enjoy being a fly on the wall watching people live their lives, most of the time not doing or saying much. Performances felt realistic.
Don't see it if Watching people do basic tasks (Fixing a sandwich, eating it, washing dishes, washing hair, waiting for the bathroom) sounds boring to you. Read more
See it if You want to experience a small bit of what it’s like to live in a homeless shelter. Somewhat immersive with audience on the stage.
Don't see it if You like a lot of action, this is fairly slow going. Sit back and let it sink in. Intimate and intense, the cast makes eye contact often. Read more
See it if you like slice-of-life docu-theater, where you watch people in real time eat soup, wash dishes, clean the floor, brush their teeth, etc.
Don't see it if you want engaging theater. LOVE is purposely slow, with little enlightening dialogue, so the 100 minutes felt endless. Not a show for me. Read more
See it if you like a show about the experiences of people in the welfare system. The acting is very good and the plot is simple, how people exist.
Don't see it if you want a show with an involved plot, great sets, and lots of action. Read more
See it if captures desperation in shelter & indignities of cruel bureaucracy; but also humanity, even love preserved in transcendent moments
Don't see it if cavernous Armory too big 4 productn; no plot, fly on wall approach produces dead moments; homelessness much more complex than portrayed Read more
See it if A Show about people who need help with housing, and the snuggles and lives of the people.
Don't see it if This is not of everyone one, but it is, for you will be grateful. Read more
Critic Reviews (11)
“CRITIC’S PICK: ‘Love’ is a great piece of theater — funny, beautifully staged, and with the kind of excitement that retunes your attention to tiny heartbreaks instead of just huge ones”
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“The story is as much about the characters’ trying and failing to see each other as it is about the audience’s doing the same. By the daringly staged last few minutes, it literally reaches out to you.”
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“ ‘Love’ does not rise to anything approaching dramatic peaks, having been stenciled directly from the lived experience of people like the characters we see...But even with minimal dialogue, the performances from all the actors are so finely etched that a certain sad warmth and sense of camaraderie with them accrues.”
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“The title of the play hangs over all this misery and by the end leaves us wondering what it means; in a place like this, people have no use for abstract ideas like love. Perhaps we're not meant to hear the title as an abstraction either, but rather as the name of a person.”
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“It's a terribly sad piece, an urgent wake-up call, and yet so enveloping is the effect of Zeldin's staging and so assured his ensemble that one can't help being totally engaged in the characters and their moment-by-moment struggle for dignity…The real miracle of Love is how it forces us to confront one of Western society's most egregious failings without making us want to turn away. It's an astonishing piece, and, in its quiet, unmelodramatic way, it demands to be seen.”
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“The script takes turns you will not see coming. The miracle is that, within these tight quarters, the human impulse to help, to reach out, does find room to flower. And if the play itself foments discussion, concern, and action, it will have fulfilled its mission.”
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Alexander Zeldin’s "LOVE" seems much longer than it actually is due to much silence and the reenactment of everyday tasks usually skipped onstage in plays. There is little dialogue and what there is tends to be rather ordinary talk about daily living. The play mainly works as a sort of experiment in the way that the Federal Theatre Project dramatized burning issues in the 1930’s. However, "LOVE" is a valuable record of life in a shelter using a documentary approach so real that it makes us feel like voyeurs. While the title remains unexplained, by the end each of the adult characters get to say it as a reminder that they have the backs of the others.
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“There are gentle crests and falls, but Zeldin is more interested in presenting a small period of time–of tragedy–in ordinary lives...These characters don’t live on the street, at least when we see them, but they are without a place to call their home and without anyone to help them find one.”
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