Cheers to Mike Bartlett's critical look at the rise and fall of a generation over the soundtrack of the Beatles' song, "All You Need is Love." Playwright Bartlett examined a generational divide from past and present viewpoints in Charles III. In the Roundabout's dark comic tragedy of Love, Love, Love, he explores the self-centered milieu of the 1960's to the present. Bartlett's follows a template of two self-involved swingers in 1967 and how they influence their future offspring they later produce. Directed by Mike Mayer, five razor-sharp cast members portray characters who are well-carved, poked at and picked apart for detailed authenticity. Guideposts from the baby boomers, the Me Generation, and the Millennials emerge shining with palpable irony. In three acts with two intermissions, we first meet Oxford students, sharp, confident Sandra (Amy Ryan) and Kenneth (Richard Armitage), in a shabby North London digs. Sandra is currently dating Kenneth's brother, Henry, who not seen again, since Sandra quickly decides she prefers Kenneth's playful lifestyle and a future that belongs to them. Sensing change in the air, Sandra and Kenneth set off together. In the second act, Sandra and Kenneth are married and living outside London two decades later, with two teenagers and some accumulated baggage. They feel trapped. The egocentricity of the '60's has not dampened their selfishness, to the detriment of their listless, ignored children, Jamie (Ben Rosenfield) and Rose (Zoe Kazan). As their parents admit cheating on each other, Jamie is treading the edges of drugs and drink, and Rose, sullen with anger and disappointment, watches her family fall apart as she and Jamie slip into the cracks. In the third act, Sandra and Kenneth are amicably divorced, but their children have suffered from their self-involved values. Jamie has not amounted to much, and Rose asks her parents for money to buy a house and they refuse. She blasts them for their narcissistic lifestyle, "You didn’t change the world, you bought it. Privatised it. What did you stand for? Peace? Love? Nothing except being able to do whatever the fuck you wanted.” Do they get it? Do they even heard her? What do you think? Bartlett's smart dialogue and efficient touches of comedy aside, it is difficult to like these characters who are deftly directed with by Michael Mayer (American Idiot). Like them or not, it is fun watching these pros cast their cruelty and react to it. Amy Ryan (A Street Named Desire) is peerless as Sandra who declares with fierce belief, "We’re entitled to do our own thing, follow our own path, no one can tell us what’s right.” Armitage, in his Broadway debut, tosses out Kenneth's charm that allows him to fall into weakness even as his aimless son sees him as a role model. Zoe Kazan (The Seagull), always an intuitive actor, does not make a wrong move as Rose. She has been engulfed in a black dour mood, living in misery and not seeing any way of getting out of it by herself. Derek McLane designed three sets of distinct economic status, from shabby '60's pad to the final upscale home. Susan Hilferty dresses Sandra in chic up to-date clothes, just as Rose remains wrapped in drab. Lighting by David Lander and sound by Kai Harado cast the different moods over the years. Love, Love, Love is another dysfunctional family and like the best of the genre, it holds up a clear mirror to life today. The last line of the Beatles song is, "Love is all you need." Is it really?
