Hey there, straight adults: Atlantic Theater Company offers Let’s Love!, a trio of short, not-so-sweet comedies on heterosexual affairs. Oh, the rest of us can enjoy the program, too, since love’s emotional confusions are known to most people, one way or another. Neil Pepe, the company’s artistic director, stages the plays in a typically neat, well-acted Atlantic production that premiered on Wednesday. All that, plus an impish Nellie McKay has been engaged to stroll out and croon little tunes at a baby grand between the acts. There’s no intermission, so you’ll be in and out of the theater in 90 minutes.
The playwright is Ethan Coen, best known for his many cool films made with his brother Joel, and who has crafted several collections of one-acts staged by Pepe at Atlantic in previous seasons. From the ease of the writing and the staging seen here, it appears that Coen and Pepe are collaborating in a comfortable groove.
The opener, The Broad at the Bar, is essentially a character study ably rendered by longtime Atlantic favorite Mary McCann. Sporting a haystack hairdo and some scary cleavage, McCann is amusingly tiresome as a bawdy old belle of too many balls drinking at her usual seat at a Second Avenue bar. Stimulated by a nice-looking stranger at her ever-bending elbow, she lewdly gasses away about baseball, Pope Paul VI, the color barrier and especially a lot about sex, at which she’s very open and killer: “Like my vagina is an electric chair and no phone call from the governor.” Dion Graham neatly broods as the dad-type some 25 years younger who nurses a gin and tonic over sobering thoughts about life and ageing.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Crafted as a series of brief black-out scenes, Dark Eyes is the centerpiece comedy and driven by a high-octane performance from Aubrey Plaza as Susan, a scornful, foul-mouthed beauty. Susan coldly seduces Tough (Chris Bauer, glowering), a moonlighting cop in a pleather jacket, into beating up her unfaithful boyfriend Dan (CJ Wilson, dithering). But no, instead the men bond over their troubles with women. When Dan’s other flame Faye (Mary Wiseman, quivering) barges into the room, it turns out she and Tough, how you say, share a past. A final scene with a nerdy fellow (Noah Robbins, nerdy-ing) who Susan meets on the J-date site, does not resolve the situation so much as merely end things with a dubious Hitler gag. Spinning around Plaza’s scathingly mean Susan, the other actors lend a dizzy sense of reality to their cartoon figures.
Closing the program pleasantly, Let’s Love presents a sweet little bonbon about a nice Girl (Dylan Gelula, very nice) and a nice Boy (Robbins, not so nerdy) whose romance survives a grossly comical fiasco during their first date in a restaurant.
Although Coen’s dialogue is often flavorful and amusing, it becomes evident these light, bright, sketchy comedies are contemplating women not so kindly through a guy’s eyes. The playwright draws the female characters – that loquacious Broad, hardboiled Susan and manipulative Faye – with considerably more colorful, if somewhat negative, detail than his men, who tend to be relatively quiet. It’s nothing to get offended about, mind; just noting. One idly wonders whether the Dark Eyes scenario might be expanded into a deeper study of what makes the dismissive Susan so alluring and how she manages to live with her toxic self.
The show looks good at the Linda Gross Theater, staged with minimal, effective scenery designed by Riccardo Hernandez and sharply lighted by designer Reza Behjat. Contemporary clothes designed by Peggy Schnitzer befit the characters, and she dresses Nellie McKay in several adorable get-ups. While the plays are a random collection of unromantic comedies, Pepe’s production rolls them into an okay Off Broadway event.
Let’s Love opened October 15, 2025 at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through November 9. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
