Love/Stories (or, But You Will Get Used To It)

Photo/Joan Marcus

How do you stop your post-modern comedy from spinning out of control? Get post-post-modern on it. In his latest work, thirty-something Itamar Moses evolves, David Foster Wallace-like, from a cute couple of modern love stories, into a series of self-referential plays that send up his own act while at the same time validating and enhancing it. It's exceptionally handled by the five-Bats ensemble of the Flea, actors who are young enough to grasp the circuitous and broken logic of Moses's characters, and also by Michelle Tattenbaum, who, having directed Moses before, knows well enough to let the words carry the brunt of the work. Moses's stand-in, Reader (John Russo) asks, in the climax of the fifth and final play, "...how on earth could some lame scene where two people just talk to each other get more than thimble-deep into anything that remotely resembles anything that even comes within a country mile of an approximation of the barest outline of the feelings that gave rise to the need to write this..." If this were ever really a question, it has been answered by Love/Stories. (Or, But You Will Regret Not Seeing This If You Don't Go Now.)

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