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True Love
Charles L. Mee

    True Love makes two important points about sex. One is that it is just one part of life, that at many moments we might choose to do other things, that it isn't that big a deal. The other point is that sex, or rather our conception of our own sexuality and what we choose to do about it, is the most important, self-defining part of our lives. That these two, seemingly contradictory ideas about sex, can be expressed side by side is a tribute to the haunting power of True Love.
    And not just sex, but love too. The characters in True Love are ravenous for both, and go to the most moving and hilarious ends to satisfy that hunger, just like the people on the subway, the neighbors, a recent president, and the people in off-Broadway theatre audiences. The play is a series of monologues sprinkled into a loosely woven plot involving a young mother, her teenage stepson, his absent father and the people she finds herself with. The gods of the theatre have dropped her down in the midst of a group of scruffy characters who seem to be hanging out in a beauty parlor and a garage. In the garage is a garage band that plays well and, sometimes, at earsplitting volume.
    The acting is perhaps the best on any New York stage at the moment.. At the center of True Love is Laurie Williams as Polly, a stepmother struggling to understand her own sexuality and deal with that of her stepson. Williams is a consummately fine actor with a very impressive emotional range and perfect control of her instrument. She is one of those actors who seem to invite an audience directly into their heart and mind and soul and who make the visit illuminating and mesmerizing.
    One of the subjects of the play is incest, and Mee creates perpetrators and victims. As a perpetrator, Christopher McCann explains how it can happen, not in a way that condones the crime, but in a way that makes the weakness and fallibility of the character palpable. Dallas Roberts plays a moving scene in which an incest victim describes the experience from his point of view. In both the scenes the temptation is to look away, to seek protection from the pain that is so honestly depicted.
    Halley Wegryn Gross portrays a twelve year old girl and Jeremiah Miller a fifteen year old boy who play out the search for love and sex from the standpoint of beginners at the game. They are excellent.
    The cast includes a chicken, played quite convincingly by Isabel, a chicken. A program note states that, unless her agent has further work, she will retire to farm upstate when the show closes. The garage band consists of four scruffy guys who, although they never speak, eerily add more than just music to the goings on. The music ranges from perfect background to aural assault.
    The performing space at the Zipper is large, open, surrounded on two sides by seating that is made up of the actual seats from vans and station wagons, bolted down, duct taped together, very cozy and comfortable. The set for True Love was designed by Christine Jones. The back wall of the performing area is floor-to-ceiling metal shelves filled with garage-type stuff, lots and lots of it, but other stuff too. There's a kid's bike, some old check-writing machines, and more. Lots and lots of stuff, and it beautifully and grotesquely reflects the world outside, stuffed as that world is with stuff. The playing area is stocked with a gas pump, a radio that seems to have a life of its own and provides some occasional eerie narration, a metal desk, and a bright red automobile in which several scenes are played, including one in the back seat that leaves two of the characters stark naked and slow dancing in the light of the headlights.
    A more effective set for this play does not, even in imagination, exist. The lighting, by Jane Cox, is perfect, and Kaye Voyce's costumes-which do not for a moment look like costumes-are also perfect. The lighting seems to come directly from the life of the play, not forced, not cute. The costumes are just exactly what these people would wear.
    True Love should run forever, so that everyone who is really interested in love and sex, or powerful, innovative, hauntingly moving theatre can see it.