What’s your love story? A slowly evolving affection that eventually ignites with passion? A dream-life that turns sour with suspicion and betrayal? A screwball comedy full of double-takes and double-entendres? If you’re not a character in a Hallmark movie, odds are that your love story (or stories) is all of these things and, perhaps, more. A human being is complicated enough on its own, but when two of them unite (or collide), the narrative is bound to be checkered and blissful, mundane and magnificent.
That’s the conceit of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Love Stories, which opened this weekend at the Broadway Theatre Center: Relationships contain multitudes.
Love Stories suggests this idea through a deft stroke of meta-theater. While the show comprises a trilogy of short plays, each involving a single couple, we watch them as if we’re witness to a rehearsal. So we get to know the actors—and their unique love story—as well as the characters they play.
Director Paula Suozzi and Forward Theater Artistic Director Jennifer Uphoff Gray developed the idea for Love Stories’ premiere production at Forward in 2012, which featured married actors James Ridge and Colleen Madden. Here, the roles are played by another real-life couple, James Pickering and Tami Workentin, who slip easily into three very different plays.
In George Bernard Shaw’s Village Wooing, we aren’t too far from the Pygmalion story of a sparring couple from mismatched backgrounds. Pickering is a curmudgeonly widow who writes travel guidebooks, Workentin is a strong-willed store clerk from a small town. They squabble their way into each other’s lives until their affection gets the best of them. Bertolt Brecht’s much darker The Jewish Wife is a brief and bleak near-monolog—a wife makes arrangements to leave Germany as the Nazis gain power. Her husband, a non-Jew who runs a hospital, concedes the inevitable. And Dorothy Parker’s Here We Are is a scene right out of the screwball comedy playbook—newlyweds nervously discussing their coming wedding night while on the train to New York. Workentin takes the Carole Lombard part while Pickering, the everyman Ralph Bellamy.
What’s remarkable here is how effortlessly Suozzi and her two actors bring us into these stories, even with just “rehearsal” sets, lighting and costumes to sketch in the mise en scene. Stage assistants mill around as they play the scene, and at times, the actors even break character to call for lines. In between the plays, stage manager Brandy Kline passes on information and instructions via her booth microphone, and acting interns Erika Kirkstein-Zastrow and Robert Knapp help set the stage, and make jokes and small talk with the crew.
And we hear from the “real-life” Workentin and Pickering—making jokes and plans, and sharing a bit of their lives. As the second act begins, Knapp asks Pickering about how he and his wife met, and he tells him the story: the long illness of his first wife, Rose; performing in a show with Workentin after Rose died; and a four-hour dinner at Maxie’s that sparked a mutual “aha” moment. In that brief scene, Jim and Tami’s love story—sketched briefly but still clearly marked by pain, mourning, renewal and joy—join the fictional love stories of their characters. They are all part of the same tapestry, whether real or invented. And Love Stories brings them together to remind us that real, human stories aren’t simple journeys from A to B, but are often tangled and circuitous, with moments that are by turns tortured, magnificent and mundane. Shaw and Parker may have been notoriously cynical about love and romance (Shaw: “The perfect love affair is one conducted entirely by post.” Parker: “And if my heart be scarred and burned/The safer, I, for all I learned.”). But this set of Love Stories is filled with charm and hope enough to melt even the stoniest heart.
