In I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I COULD DIE, A Loss Beyond Words, and Beyond Theater - Review
Theater feels a bit grim right now. Not the state of the industry – though, that as well. Just the work itself.
Consider my last few weeks of theatergoing: Rachel Bonds’ Jonah probed the long shadow of childhood trauma, Ruby Thomas’ The Animal Kingdom locked us into group therapy with a fractured family reeling from a suicide attempt, and Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’ Days of Wine and Roses grimly chronicled the collapse of a marriage wrecked by alcoholism.
“Trauuma,” to quote Jamie Lee. It can be a lot to take in, night after night. (I know — such hardship.) But Jonah, Kingdom and Roses do at least allow their audience some degree of catharsis. Someone learns to trust again; or begins to push their way out of depression; or finds purpose in helping others. There is, in the end, a little bit of hope.
Mona Pirnot’s new solo piece I Love You So Much I Could Die, at New York Theatre Workshop through March 9, gently posits that certain suffering sits outside of what theater can begin to make sense of, let alone process. An artist can put a narrative around the pain, sure. They can hit on some kind of truth. But the worst of it, the darkest depths, are beyond what theater can truly honor.
And we don’t really want to see the worst of it anyway. Do we?
Perhaps that is why Pirnot has her back turned to us. Sitting before a desk facing the theater’s back wall, with the essentials laid out before her – water bottle, desk lamp, laptop – she never once turns around. Nor does she speak a word, instead hitting a few keys on the laptop and letting a Microsoft Office text-to-speech program read the script aloud.
The laptop recounts Pirnot’s hazy, dreamlike return to New York City in late 2020 following several months at her family home in Florida. She returned home after a tragic event which, at first, is left vague. Pirnot seeks out support groups, tries out volunteering, and staves off panic attacks.
In between each story, Pirnot picks up a guitar and sings a short song. These tunes are sweet and soulful, their sensitivity clashing deliberately with the stilted computer speech.
The contrast isn’t black and white, though – both forms have a falseness. The computer is inhuman, mispronouncing words in an amusing manner (it finds four different intonations on “Shia LaBeouf”'). But there is also a wryness to its voice, and that dry wit matches Pirnot’s humor perfectly.
And when Pirnot does detail the tragedy which drew her to Florida, the program is perfectly utilized to place us into her headspace. Pirnot sets it to rattle off the tale without pauses. As the computer frantically rushes through the information, faster than we could possibly take it in, you feel transported into Pirnot’s overloaded brain.
The songs, meanwhile, start to feel like a packaging of emotions, more like a way to make sense of what Pirnot and her family are facing. Nothing wrong with that – it’s what art is for. But is it any less artificial than that strange, blank voice emanating from the laptop? With a tragedy this destabilizing, I’m not sure.
Here we hit up against Pirnot’s intentional vagueness around what it is, precisely, that she is processing. Suffice to say that it involves her sister and the aftermath of an accident. The show itself provides more detail— but not much more. Pirnot wants to shift our attention to the sensation of life-altering trauma and what it does to our bodies, rather than make an exhaustive spectacle of her specific situation. Do we really need all the nitty gritty, the medical details?
The show is also a love story – and on this point, Pirnot is more forthcoming. Alongside the events of 2020, she recounts meeting and falling for a shy playwright with big hair several years prior. (This is presumably Lucas Hnath, now her husband, who directs Die with characteristic precision.) Carefully woven throughout the piece, their love story is tender and cute. And because it is a happy thing, we are permitted to hear the little details.
In the show’s most devastating section, Pirnot recounts she and her mother putting down their dog Angus. Here, the level of detail becomes overwhelming. As each of Angus’ many nicknames were listed (Angusto, Goose, Goosey, Baby Goose, Butters, Porkchop) I felt myself losing it. But why, I wondered, was I crying only here, and not elsewhere in this story?
Pirnot knows why. There is a process we have built around ending a pet’s life which feels clear, sensical, something one can wrap their head around. Whereas the thing that happened to Pirnot, the thing this show is actually about, is something I cannot truly wrap my head around. And ultimately, that’s okay. We can only withstand so much.
