Guest Blog: Gary Condes On Absurdism, Nostalgia and LUV at Park Theatre

LUV is by Murray Schisgal, best known for writing the screenplay for Tootsie, and it first premiered on Broadway in 1964, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson. It won a number of Tony awards and later in the run made a star of Gene Wilder.

That's quite the prestigious pedigree, and when I first read LUV it didn't disappoint. Suffice to say I immediately fell in love with the play - it echoed the best of the absurdist playwrights while reminding me nostalgically of a wealth of New York movies. Here was a high comedy that also had depth and range, was by turns hilarious and serious, larger than life while still maintaining a recognisably human heart.

What Murray Schisgal has done with this play is rip the 'theatre of the absurd' into pieces and reassembled it on an iconic New York bridge along with a very ironic raised eyebrow. Absurdism customarily uses laughter to evoke despair, but with LUV, Schisgal uses the histrionic pretensions of despair in a metropolis to provoke laughter.

LUV is a completely charming play. It begins with old college friends Milt and Harry meeting one night on a bridge, and they proceed to uncover their miserable lives. It's full of heartfelt humour that gets us to face those existential questions that arise when examining the very nature of love, namely how we define it and how we measure it. Its strengths lie in its colourful characters, extreme circumstances, laugh-out-loud dialogue, physical comedy and infectious energy. The attraction for me as a director was the clever mix of absurd humour, touching drama and social and philosophical commentary that provides the opportunity to make audiences feel joy and despair all in the same show.

In an age of calculated, self-aware, subtle comedy I aim to provide audiences with a good old cathartic belly laugh at how self-indulgent humans can get with their own despair. In LUV, audiences can expect a delicious high-energy romp through a multitude of matters: marriage, relationships, loneliness, lost identity, desires, ambitions, failures, suicide and, of course, love! The performances from our three actors, Charles Dorfman, Nick Barber and Elsie Bennett, are bold but grounded in emotional truth so that audiences can connect to the character's despair through laughter.

Every era has its own pressures, hypocrisies and pious obsessions, and this play is a glorious comic reminder of how fractured modern urban existence can get and how love indeed does conquer all! It's never 'out of time' to remind ourselves of ourselves. It's a warning of how urban living can be isolationist and destructive to loving relationships and in doing so, reminds us how hard we often make it for ourselves and how hard society makes it for us to be satisfied in our relationships and our ambitions.

Through style, design and performance I aim to evoke a movie-like nostalgia, and the iconic New York bridge on which the action plays out will provide a warm reminder of many movies and TV series which have come to define New York iconography - Woody Allen's Manhattan being an obvious one. It plays out amidst the mid-1960s New York zeitgeist, and as a result the characters are forced to face themselves and a newfound modernist existential despair, which causes them to lose their heads with hilarious results.

The performances will be influenced by a mix of absurdist humour, vaudeville and Broadway comedy and yet grounded in truth, so that it feels we're witnessing Neil Simon and Mel Brooks giving birth to twins: Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco!

LUV will make you laugh, cry, wistful for the past and hopeful for the future and send you off into the Christmas streets clicking your heels in a carefree manner at the ridiculousness of the whole human drama. If you want an alternative Christmas show to warm you up this winter, then this is it.

I'll leave the last words with Joseph Campbell: "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive."

LUV is at Park Theatre 8 December-7 January, 2017

Watch a trailer below

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