Strategic Love Play Off-Broadway Reviews

Strategic Love Play is like a good first date that nonetheless lacks a spark — it's not memorable enough for a second round, but a pleasant time while you're there, largely due in part to Yorke and Zegen's individual excellence and common chemistry.

Produced by Audible, Inc. and Chase This Production, the live performance of Strategic Love Play, with its humorous and contrary characterizations by the excellent Zegen and Yorke, will also be recorded and released at a later date on Audible, so if you can’t make it to Minetta Lane, you can listen to the audio version of the play at home and around the world, and find out if the time is right for them to heal their wounds and open themselves up to honesty, trust, and love again.

Unfortunately, clichés abound throughout this thin exploration of conscious coupledom, directed with regrettably slack rhythms by Katie Posner. The romantic comedy genre is not an endlessly deep well, but it feels as if we’ve encountered every plot point under a more interesting guise before. Jenny (Heléne Yorke), staring down the barrel of another year alone, tries desperately to convince herself that love requires compromise. Adam (Michael Zegen), a prototypical nice guy, pines for a female friend now married to a man of whom he doesn’t approve. In the script, the characters are called simply “Woman” and “Man,” perhaps in a nod to universality—but it also underscores the lack of specificity or personality in much of Battye’s writing.

Yorke is a bit too loud, abrasive, and quick to laugh at her jokes — and she upsets the norms and rhythms of courtship that we’ve come to expect from decades of rom-coms. We can see it in Zegen’s stuttering responses, his self-conscious rubbing of his hands up and down his pant legs, and the way that she keeps throwing him off his game while still sparking his interest. Not that this guy has much rizz. He’s a self-described “nice normal person” who says he works at Mount Sinai, but immediately fesses up that he’s an auditor and not a doctor, who quickly admits he used a fake name on his profile, and who blurts out details about his most recent ex, a woman who dumped him after 16 months who remains a rent-free tenant in his brain.

Yorke, who has received excellent notices in HBO Max's "The Other Two" and was a memorable Olive in the musical Bullets Over Broadway, and Zegen, who is best known as Joe Maisel in "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" and was quite good in Trouble in Mind on Broadway a few seasons back, create believable character arcs. They gently peel back the layers of pain left by past relationships. As potential lovers, though, Yorke and Zegen lack the requisite sparks. Their jabs and stabs, particularly early in the play, are devoid of sexual tension, and it isn't plausible that one or both hadn't left after the first drink. Regrettably, this is a blind date that seemed doomed from the first swipe.