Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Joan Marcus ©2025  Michael Micalizzi & Maren Langdon

Itamar Moses, the talented young playwright behind such plays as Bach at Leipzig, The Four of Us and the recent steroids-in-baseball drama Back Back Back, is what you could call a wordsmith. He loves using them, twisting their meaning, fragmenting them, and allowing them to float in the air like particles. His plays follow a narrative pattern, but their true pattern is that of speech, and how characters express themselves through it. And Moses’ stories often fold into themselves, which, depending on the project, can either enthrall or aggravate an audience.

His assemblage of one-acts with the wordy, unruly title of Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used To It), is likely to produce both feelings in the viewer. Supernaturally clever, yet oddly distancing, Moses takes familiar situations and turns them on their head, beginning with an acting audition where a playwright’s ex’s boyfriend comes in to read, and how a girl called in to simply read helps him out of his bind. The next segment centers on a temp office where a dutiful guy (Michael Micalizzi, very charming throughout) listens to his cube mate have an emotional breakdown over a lost love, all the while finding her undeniably attractive. These are the more conventional of the quintet, but zero in on the playwright’s knack for collecting conversation, particularly in the second segment, where a phone conversation consisting of “yeah” and “I know” becomes almost symphonic.

Joan Marcus ©2025  Felipe Bonilla, John Russo & Laurel Holland

The third piece is set in an apartment where a young couple have a small spat over whether the male party should have moved in, resulting in a few tears and disagreements (it should be noted that the female character in these bunch of playlets come off as a bit too shrill, though not the fault of the first-rate actresses Laurel Holland and Maren Langdon). Then Moses turns this on its head, with the two actors creating a writer’s view of the very same scene complete with directionals and intents, and then flips it even more, when the two actors address each other (by real name) in a scene about them performing said scene and admitting their backstage attractions. This is the most ambitious of the shorts, showing process in three different fashions.

Scene 4 involves a Russian director and moderator, and how their relationship becomes clearer to us as the symposium progresses. This is the most humorous of the batch, though too reliant on easy laughs (would a Russian actress really call Chekhov’s The Seagull the “garbage bird” as if she didn’t know it“). But the performers shine here: Langdon is winsome and winning here, and Felipe Bonilla, playing the director who only speaks Russian, conveys quite a bit with limited resources.

Joan Marcus ©2025  Laurel Holland & Michael Micalizzi

It’s the last segment that really grinds the evening (already a bit overextended at 105 minutes with no break) to a slow halt. Our Reader (John Russo) introduces a male-female scene only to go into a momentous monologue about writers' intent, and what’s going on in their minds. Despite Russo’s committed, charismatic rendering, it simply seems like redux after the previous scenes, one of which already touched on this same subject a bit, and it’s the one segment where attention goes quickly to non-stage-related things; quite ironic, since the scene just prior has a lengthy pause within it where the Russian director surmises that the audience thought of sex during it.

Director Michelle Tattenbaum shrewdly uses the difficult Flea space downstairs (basically a large rectangle) to her advantage, and guides the actors ably, though doesn’t overcome the preciousness of some of Moses’s writing. It’s odd to see this after his more developed full-length efforts, some of which are quite affecting, whereas these one-acts are a bit studied and clinical in comparison. These are a more acquired taste, but it’s hard to deny his craftiness, and as the play even states explicitly, if his style is not for you, You Will Get Used To It.