You can be sober, you can be into it, you can say “yes”—but who’s in charge? This is a really subtle and intense play about the realization that a past sexual relationship maybe wasn’t as consensual as you thought it was, or wanted it to be. It’s a play about power. It’s about the oftentimes painful reckoning that occurs when someone realizes that, yes, maybe it happened to me too, and why am I so afraid to admit it? LOVE is one of my favorite plays I’ve read this year.

Caught LOVE at the 2019 Ojai Playwrights Conference. Cortesi shows exactly how incredibly charming womanizers have gotten the art of serial seduction down to a science and asks compelling questions about intimacy, desire and accountability. When the costs of telling the truth are high (like career endingly, marriage endingly high), this play makes the argument that perhaps the benefits of telling that same truth just may be even higher. A delicious, disturbing and paradigm shifting visit to the oh-so-recent pre-MeToo workplace.