In this experiment in storytelling, Mona Pirnot spends just over an hour with her back to the audience, intermittently picking up an acoustic guitar and singing a song (she does this five times), but mostly sitting still at her desk while a text-to-speech program on a laptop recites in a mechanical male voice what she’s written. What she’s written are stories about the ways she has tried to avoid thinking about what the playbill calls “an unexpected personal event in March 2020,” while at the same time she avoids telling us what happened. We do eventually learn what traumatized her (which involves a member of her family) although not in much detail. By then it has become clear that the point of “I Love You So Much I Could Die” is the ways she dealt with her grief rather than what caused it — and, on a different level, the storytelling itself, rather than the story.
The first stories we hear are of the various support groups she sought out, none of them a great fit. At one, she (or the computer program) tells of a woman who was angry at a Waffle House, since apparently that is where something happened to a loved one – so angry that the woman talked about burning the Waffle House down. Normally, we’re told, it would be inappropriate to talk about what someone reveals during a support group, but she feels in this case, “It’s ok to share, because that woman was me.”
She next tries to avoid thinking about her trauma by volunteering to deliver food to the homebound for “God’s Love We Deliver,” because she didn’t want just “to stare at the ceiling and drink.” She tries reading self-help memoirs, detailing one by a Holocaust survivor whose apercus include “the opposite of depression is expression.”
Later she (or the computer-generated voice) goes into great detail about the illness and death of a much-beloved family pet.
There is a surprising amount of humor in these anecdotes, and even in the mostly melancholic songs; one of them, she explains, should really be played on an electric guitar, but since her guitar is acoustic, she uses her voice to mimic the electric guitar riffs.
Arguably the core story of the piece begins with how she met and fell in love with a then little-known playwright with big eyes and big hair who has become famous, and with whom she has been in a couple now for a decade. It is a charming tale at first, with some memorable details – how after they first met in person, she noticed she had developed abrasions on both elbows because she had spent three hours leaning on them while the two of them talked. But suddenly the computer voice ramps up to a feverish pace, keeps on saying “cut to” and speeds through disparate events, including what little we learn of the precipitating trauma.
Although he’s never named on stage, the playwright in question is obviously Lucas Hnath, who is the director of “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” and whose influence on it is palpable. As a playwright, Hnath traffics in novelty, which hasn’t always worked for me, but when it has – in such plays as “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Dana H.” — it’s been breathtaking.
Late in this new piece, we’re told most explicitly its guiding premise: “I don’t know how to write the story of what happened in Florida. I tried. Every time I try to write that story it breaks and I break. I stopped trying. I just write what I can.”
I can see some theatergoers dismissing the way Pirnot and Hnath tell her story as gimmicky; avant-garde affectation. Even the design, which is a kind of anti-design – Mimi Lien’s set no set, just the brick walls of the stage, and the desk in the middle – could reinforce that impression. But I found much of it unexpectedly moving, and I suspect the unconventional theatrical elements helped contribute to my reaction – the flat affect of the computer-generated voice and the antisocial act of turning her back to us conveying Pirnot’s emotional detachment and sense of isolation.
Pirnot (or, again, the computer voice) tells us she used the program, called Microsoft David, to communicate with her therapist, and even at one point also with Hnath, implying that it was the only way at the time she could bring herself to communicate at all. This suggests that Pirnot is communicating as authentically and intimately on stage with the audience as she has with those she loves and trusts.
But then at the end of the show, she stood up, faced us for the first time, and smiled; a curtain call. This was natural – maybe the first normal moment in the show – but, oddly, it made me wonder. Is Pirnot really distilling herself at her most distraught for a nightly performance, or is she just playing a character, using some novel storytelling techniques? And how much of the effectiveness of those techniques is due simply to their novelty? If anything, my questioning made me engage with the show even more.
I Love You So Much I Could Die
New York Theater Workshop through March 9
Running time: 65 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $49-$69
Written and performed by Mona Pirnot
Directed by Lucas Hnath
Scenic design by Mimi Lien, costume design by Enver Chakartash, lighting design by Oona Curley, sound design by Mikhail Fiksel and Noel Nichols, music director Will Butler
