Review: Love and the Art of the Deal in Strategic Love Play

The market for romance has never been vaster. Not long ago it was perfectly reasonable to limit one’s search for a partner to family friends, neighbors, and classmates. But in 2024, apps like Hinge allow daters to cast an incredibly wide net, with a user-friendly interface that presents the catch in an endless scroll, like you might encounter shopping for underwear on Amazon. This is the globalization of love, and if we’re optimizing the hunt, why not streamline the first date?

Miriam Battye imagines one couple doing just that in Strategic Love Play, now making its New York premiere with Audible Theater at the Minetta Lane Theatre (Chase This Productions is a coproducer). A bracingly funny, brutally efficient satire of modern love, it has all the hallmarks of a contemporary classic.

It’s obvious from the first beat that the date between our man (Michael Zegen) and woman (Heléne Yorke) is going badly. Voices pitch up through forced smiles as both participants frantically attempt to fill the void that should be chemistry. He’s about to call it a night after one drink, but she counters with a novel proposal. What if they cut the small talk and skip right to their true feelings and desires?

“Wouldn’t it be so nice,” she entices him like she’s selling a reliable SUV, “to meet a girl. Who would just. Be so great and so indestructible that you’d never have to accidentally be the dick again.”

Yorke has the indomitable charisma to pull off this implausible plot twist, which initiates a tonal shift for the entire play. She vigorously twirls until we’re over that rainbow, barely noticing that we’ve dropped a house on any pretense of realism (Arnulfo Maldonado’s set, which suggests a Flatiron singles bar as Sartrean purgatory, helps us stick the landing). Suddenly, we’re in a high-stakes contract negotiation, and our two daters are transformed into Hollywood agents. The deal? A long-term relationship.

Battye’s rapid-fire style is reminiscent of Sophie Treadwell or Eugene O’Neill at his most experimental. She stretches the ongoing trend of market logic in coupling (the sex advice columnist Dan Savage is the great evangelist of this) into a marvelously springy trampoline on which the two performers bounce to dizzying heights of language and expression.

When he asks her if she is professionally successful, she unsurprisingly says, “Very. And I need my own TV.” That last bit is tossed out almost as an afterthought, the bouquet of roses in the dressing room.

“That’s cool,” he responds enthusiastically, “I don’t even watch TV.” And from the look on her face, it seems that we might have stumbled into a deal-breaker.

As he did on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Zegen excels in the role of the nice guy with puppy-dog eyes who secretly might be an asshole. Social graces restrict him from coming to the table with his true desires in his first offer, but Yorke’s woman doesn’t have time for male politesse. She wants a man who knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to take it, unafraid to slap him down if he goes too far. And in this invigorating volley, Zegen and Yorke conjure the chemistry that was missing earlier. Is it enough to close the deal?

Director Katie Posner’s production is a well-oiled machine, with no noticeable squeaks or hiccups — not to mention dead air. Tei Blow’s sound design offers notes of tension and a whiff of ambient music, suggesting extreme focus for our two characters. The most powerful negotiator is the one who can afford to walk away from the table, and Dede Ayite offers a hint as to whom that is by outfitting the woman in a business-casual blazer with a skimpy, lacy top underneath. No matter how this thing goes, she’s having fun tonight.

Lighting designer Jen Schriever provides the stock ticker for the evening with an overhead mood ring. When negotiations are going well, the lights glow a comforting incandescent; but as things go south, they turn a sour blue. It’s a perfectly on-the-nose choice for a play that doesn’t beat around the bush. Tinder should commission her to work on the visual interface of its next AI tool. Won’t courting be so much easier once ChatGPT can spruce up your sexts?

Of course, not everyone is on board with this bold new world of breakneck innovation and capitalist competition. Last week’s presidential election might even be interpreted as a vote against the extension of market logic into every aspect of our lives by a weary population, most specifically by those whose price has only fallen. For them, Strategic Love Play is more than a satire, but a dark vision of a dystopian future in which everyone is constantly buying and selling, yet no one is ever satisfied.