Let's Love! Off-Broadway Reviews

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 endlessly raunchy Let’s Love! revels in its own outrageousness, feeling like an evening of Playboy magazine cartoons come to life. It’s funny as hell, but you’ll feel the need to take a shower afterwards.

Let’s Love! is a comic, microscopic introspection on sex, relationships, and love across three disparate stories — nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps the show arrives with expectations of ambition due to its playwright: Ethan Coen of the Coen Brothers, who previously penned the existential play trio Almost an Evening. If that show aimed to be the apple in Eden, the more modest Let’s Love! wants to be a box of bittersweet chocolate.

What’s very entertaining about “Let’s Love!” and even a bit jolting is that three of the female characters (Mary McCann, Aubrey Plaza, Mary Wiseman) get all the dirtiest lines. In other words, Cohen is writing female characters like no other playwright today. In light of all this feminine off-color, it’s no surprise that four of the male characters (Chris Bauer, Dion Graham, Noah Robbins, CJ Wilson) emerge as very reactive, if not a little colorless at times.

For all its exclamation mark, Let's Love! confuses cruelty for comedy and explores love more through crude provocations and bodily functions than genuine emotional commitment. If Coen is trying to expose human folly or moral decrepitude, he doesn't build the coherence or analytical distance that true satire needs. In a tacked-on, final tableau, the entire ensemble suddenly joins McKay in a deliberately cacophonous "love song." Perhaps this jam wants to suggest harmony in imperfection, but it plays like a curtain call for ideas unearned.