Do we really need more plays about love? Didn’t Shakespeare nail the subject when he took quill to parchment to show us the fanfare and foibles that follow Cupid’s arrow?
Aye me, ever since then the stage has been plagued by love stories — some good, some bad and some downright painful.
After 400 years of fixation, is there anything left to say?
Katherine Glover’s one-woman show A Cynic Tells Love Stories takes a stab at the age-old subject by revisiting it from the perspectives of the hopeless romantic, the cynic, the slut and the wife.
Using stories from her own experience, Glover navigates her way through her bisexual love life and attempts to make sense of it all by way of seducing pornstars, falling for straight girls and taking a crack at married life.
“There were stories that I knew I wanted to tell, and then I realized that they shared a common theme of being stories about love,” Glover says. “Not in a sappy, happily-ever-after way, but more of a what-the-hell? Why does this not make any sense? Why is it so crazy and stupid all the time?”
Glover’s provocative storytelling goes beyond providing entertaining and touching fodder for our inner romantic. Her experience reads more like a meditation on affairs of the heart as she examines the differences between her relationships with men and women and what the term slut actually means.
While it is yet another show about love, there’s nothing conventional about this Fringe-worthy take on the greatest fixation of the human condition.
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