Marc Miller takes a look at Imperfect Love:
The Connelly Theater, on East Fourth, is an elegant old-style off-Broadway house, with gilded proscenium arch, dramatic red curtain, and ample wing space to store enormous set changes. Which makes it an apt venue for Imperfect Love, Brandon Cole's "serious comedy" chronicling onstage and backstage crises at Rome's Teatro Argentina 120 years ago or so. Cole has researched the period and the dramatis personae—based on the great actress Eleonora Duse and her playwright-poet-lover, Gabriele D'Annunzio—exhaustively, and the heady scent of greasepaint certainly fills the air, metaphorically if not literally. As a celebration of theater and an exploration of how the form absorbs or fails to absorb change, Imperfect Love—we don't find out what the title means until the closing moments—is diverting. There just isn't a whole lot else going on. . . . |
