Review: PERFECT LOVE at Blue Raven Theatre

Actress, playwright, and director Talia Pura's new play, Perfect Love, shows through a series of highly engaging vignettes, that love is a sometimes wonderful, sometimes painful, often complex and multifaceted thing. Pura, along with actors Amanda Cazares, Tyler Nunez, and Hamilton Turner, each took on nearly a dozen roles in this enjoyable production demonstrating love in many of its manifestations.

The play consists of sixteen brief vignettes portraying breakups, new relationships, and all sorts of complicated situations in between - it brought to mind both the musical "I Love You, You're Perfect... Now Change" and the play "Constellations", at times, in how the vignettes worked, although the aforementioned pieces present relationships in a relatively chronological order, and Perfect Love did not.

A couple of the vignettes seemed loosely connected (with characters sharing names in some scenes with characters referenced in other scenes, and events referenced in one set of scenes had apparently just happened in another); a favorite part of the production for me was a particular scene that was performed four times throughout with different combinations of actors, who also played the scene with different intentions to achieve a variety of results... no easy feat, and it is a testament to the ability of the actors and Ms. Pura's direction and writing that the scene was so effective in each iteration.

Make no mistake, though - Perfect Love gives its four actors plenty of opportunities to stretch themselves and play wildly different characters with the aid of different costumes and wigs, as well as physicalities and accents. It was delightful, too, to see performances by this group of actors who were so clearly game to try whatever the script threw at them (the play is billed as not appropriate for young children, and while there is nothing truly inappropriate or lewd, it does veer into fairly suggestive territory in a few vignettes).

In general, the actors presented very nuanced, believable characters in each scene; my only complaint was that occasionally, some parts of scenes were played perhaps more quietly and intimately than the larger space at Warehouse 21 called for. Even so, each piece was interesting, often unpredictable, and quite relatable for, I'm sure, most audience members.

Perfect Love was a delightful afternoon well spent, and would be lovely as girls night or date night entertainment, as well as a pretty darn fun excursion for anyone who wants to indulge in some of the newest work available in the Santa Fe theatre scene.

Perfect Loves runs Thursday - Sunday through December 23 at Warehouse 21 (1614 Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe.) Tickets are $25 for general admission and may be purchased online via Brown Paper Tickets at https://m.bpt.me/event/3629455.

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