Theater review | "Love Person" speaks to the heart — in four languages

Theater Review |

Language! Of all the features that separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, language is probably most significant. It's our ability to convey abstract ideas that has led over the eons to the development of increasingly sophisticated thought and highly developed societies. "Love Person," on stage at Live Girls!, provides a provocative exploration of human communication.

Written by Aditi Brennan Kapil and making its Northwest debut after a "rolling premiere" at small companies around the U.S., the play's four characters communicate with one another and to the audience in oral English, American Sign Language (ASL), Sanskrit and e-mail formats. As the play progresses we find that each mode can enhance, complicate or distort the underlying ideas and emotions, especially when translations are necessary.

Directors Joy Brooke Fairfield and Dawn Stoyanoff have pulled together a good cast and an effective production crew. The play opens with three women in a bar. Free (Kim Nungesser) is a deaf person whose lesbian partner, Maggie (Kelly Johnson), can speak in ASL, as can her hearing sister Vic (Lisa Reynolds).

Vic has just met a Sanskrit scholar visiting from India named Ram (Agastya Kohli), and she can already hear wedding bells. She's the sort who lets emotion overwhelm intellect, and Vic is hungry for love. Her aggressive assault on the man almost dooms the affair, but her sister saves it. By chance, Free intercepts an e-mail, and begins a reasoned, less emotionally volatile relationship with Ram electronically. She's not as witty as Cyrano de Bergerac, but she's playing a role much like his, and successfully charms Ram, who thinks he's falling in love with sister Vic.

Free's deceits lead to troubles in her own relationship with Maggie, and the interplay of the developing and deteriorating relationships revolves, of course, on the use of languages. It's a fugue in four languages that eventually reaches a balanced and happy conclusion.

There is one unfortunate problem, however. English translations for the Sanskrit poems and the ASL conversations are too often projected so far away from the actors that the audience can't see both at the same time.

This is a significant frustration in an otherwise interesting and challenging work of theater.

Nancy Worssam: nworssam@earthlink.net