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Love! Labour! Loss!

by Edward Albee, Mike Ward, Tom Kelly
SF Weekly review by Michael Scott Moore

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"Love! Labour! Loss!"
Isis Arts Collective's trilogy of one-acts
This trilogy of one-acts was cobbled
together by Isis Arts Collective after
the success of Counting the Ways,
a brief Edward Albee bagatelle, at
last year's Fringe Festival. Counting
the Ways starts with the line, "Do
you love me?" and so -- too cleverly
-- do the other two plays in this
trilogy, Decaf by Mike Ward and
Points of View by Tom Kelly.
Counting the Ways is the reason to
see the show. An English husband
and wife who might have been strong competitors in Monty
Python's "Upper Class Twit of the Year" contest discuss their
relationship in quick, sometimes very funny scenes. Danielle Thys
plays "She," in silk blouse and pearls, describing how distasteful
sex with her husband has become. "Do you think you can just
shove it in me?" she asks, in a snooty, fluting voice, as if asking
the gardener if he thought there might be asparagus this season.
Leo Lawhorn plays her portly, befuddled husband, "He," who
admits to loving his wife only in the vicinity of crème brûlée. The
play is a bit formal and dry, but also well chiseled and totally
meaningless (in the best sense). Decaf, a play about Loss,
consists of a strange therapy session involving a husband, a wife,
and a domineering psychologist. It's mostly space filler. Points of
View, the piece about Labour, deconstructs the experience of
theatergoing, and features a good routine about an audience
member (Micaelee Ellswythe) and her cell phone. Points has the
quality of a clever comic strip. Neither add-on play reaches
Albee's inspired senselessness, and the evening as a whole
doesn't work nearly as well as its centerpiece.

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