All You Need is Love, or How to Tanscend a Happy Marriage

In 1967, the Beatles released what was arguably their sappiest song: "All You Need Is Love." It became an anthem of the hippie era -- encapsulating the sentiment of the San Francisco Summer of Love -- much the way "We Shall Overcome" became an anthem of the slightly earlier civil rights movement.

The notion that love can conquer all is back, in the form of a play by Sarah Rhul called "How to transcend a happy marriage" that is currently playing in New York at Lincoln Center.





Unless one is seeing an outright comedy -- lots of laughs from beginning to end -- one goes to the theater expecting to be made uncomfortable in one way or another and thus, hopefully, being prompted to think about certain things anew. Often discomfort comes in the form of emotional expression that would be difficult to experience in real life without serious consequences.

In Rhul's play, the requisite discomfort takes a different form:  a protracted, no-holds-barred, discussion of alternative sexual options by two happily married couples, both with young children, who have long been best friends. This is prompted by the one of the women telling the others of a very attractive temporary employee at her office who is open about the fact that she lives in a polyamorous relationship with two men.

After speculating about the nature of their sexual activity -- and in the process, starting to wonder about each other -- the couples decide to invite the woman and her partners over for a New Year's Eve dinner party to find out what it's all about and not unexpectedly, one thing leads to another.

There are added complications, of course. The polyamorous woman in question only eats meat from animals she herself has "respectfully" killed and certain issues arise from that: our animal nature, which Ms Ruhl argues is necessary for the production of children.

A play that starts out distinctly non-PG13 friendly ends as Hollywood insists most movies should: feel-good.

Life is best when we all live it harmoniously, as illustrated by a classical minuet that gets richer and richer as more instruments are added. That notion, which ends the play, suggests that lives lived where love is spread outside of the immediate family are best. Whether such love would necessarily involve or inevitably lead to extra-marital sex is a question Ruhl doesn't explicitly answer.

Viewers can come to their own conclusions based on what they see in the final scene.

While the play's eventual sugar coating struck me as a bit much, it was nonetheless in some ways a relief from the usual carnage, to use a word that has unfortunately become au currant, that so many Broadway plays about couples often end with.

I'll have more to say about "How to transcend a happy marriage" in a subsequent post.