Playwright Mona Pirnot tried something a little unconventional when, in the darkest moments of a family tragedy, she couldn't find the strength to verbally express her feelings to her boyfriend and therapist. She typed her own thoughts into her laptop and sent her text message. – A speech synthesis program to speak them out loud.
It was a coping mechanism that also triggered a creative change of direction. Pirnot's then-boyfriend and her current husband, Lukas Nass, is also a playwright, with a long-standing interest in sound and a recent career building shows around disembodied voices. There is. His last play, “A Simulacrum,'' featured a magician reenacting his own conversation with Funas, whose voice was heard on a tape recording. And the play before that, “Dana H,'' featured a lip-synced interview with an actress who talked about the trauma of having the playwright's mother kidnapped.
Currently, Funas is directing Pirnot, who is also the screenwriter and sole actor of I Love You to Death. The film is a diary exploration of how she was affected by a life-changing event that left her sister incapacitated at the beginning of the pandemic. During the 65-minute show, which took place off-Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop, Pirnnot sat in a ladder chair facing away from the audience while a Microsoft text-to-speech program read her lines. During chapters of the story, Pirnot plays the guitar and sings songs she has written.
The computer voice is masculine, robotic, and of course unemotional. Its rhythm and the length of the pauses depend on how Pirnot and Hunas punctuated the text. While the show occasionally makes mistakes — there's a joke about Shia LaBeouf's pronunciation — the artists cherish it. Hearing a machine talk about a very human suffering is awkwardly funny, and the audience laughs as they get used to the disorienting experience, especially early in the show.
“I like how relentless I can be.” [the computer’s] I think that voice is kind of shocking and surprising and sometimes very moving and sometimes very disturbing,” Pirnott said. “I feel like this is actually capturing and sharing a little bit of what this felt like.”
This piece features some of Hnath's signature fingerprints. Like his 2015 play “The Christians,” set in an evangelical church, “I Love You to Death” features snaking cords and cables, a nod to his penchant for transparent scenography. reflects. The set, designed by Mimi Lien, is very It's simple.
“It's not very smooth,” Funas said. “This is basically a statement that says, 'We're not pretending.' We're just getting down to business. I'm worried it will end up being a pure art installation.” Every time something gets clever, I stop believing in it or wonder, 'What are they hiding?'
Hnath has been experimenting with disturbing uses for audio for some time. Also included are The Thin Place, a play about psychics published in 2019, and Dana H. Moment When You Hear a Deeply Disturbing Sound. And in Mikhail Fixel's sound design for “Dana H.,” “A Simulacrum,” and now “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” voices and speakers are separated in various ways. .
“I think deep down inside of me, there's a part of me that's a frustrated composer. My first love was music, and I always wanted to compose music, so I approached playwriting. A lot of it is very compositional,” Hunas said. He added that he enjoys “having control over the sound quality and rhythm.” “You can build it so it doesn't change. That's exactly what I mean.”
Funas's plays often contain what he unapologetically calls “gimmicks.” This is a task for performers with no room for error, as the actress perfectly imitates another woman's words, breathing, and pacing. His next play is about memorizing lines, with an older performer performing the lines alongside a younger performer. Funas describes it as “a learning nightmare – someone gets their lines wrong five different ways – I don't know how they're going to learn it.”
For “I Love You to Death,” Pirnott and Hunath gradually settled on a text-to-speech solution. Initially, in 2020 and 2021, Pillnot wrote about grief as a way to process his emotions. Part of it was like his diary. Some of the conversations she had with her family were almost completely transcribed. At some point, Funas thought that Pirnot should turn this material into a memoir.
When they started talking about presenting the work, it was still at the peak of the pandemic, and in-person gatherings were complicated. So they held early readings with actors via video conference. Pirnot and Hunas briefly discussed having her script read cold by a different actor each time.
Pirnot tested the text-to-speech idea with a short podcast monologue. And at her house, she worked at a desk at the foot of her bed. This meant that sometimes she would play material with her back to him as he sat in bed, and that setting influenced when the play went in the next direction. their living room, Dartmouth's Ensemble Studio Theater (for residency), and now the New York Theater Workshop, which opens Wednesday.
Over time, the story becomes more about Pillnot's feelings and less about her sister's medical situation, which she does not elaborate on in the play.
“Everything that's in this show is about the experience of when your life is torn apart and completely falls apart, and what you do with all those pieces and how that feels and how you keep moving forward. “It's very intentional to report on,” she said. . “I felt I could provide that experience without having to say, 'By the way, here is the exact order of the most excruciating and unrelenting series of events that led to my new understanding.'”
Why write about something so painful if you don’t want to share the details?
“After fighting so hard to keep a loved one alive, the question arises: what and why?” she says. “This is what I have to share. This is what I really want to express. Even though I ask myself every night, 'How could I have done this?' How can we share so much? ’ That’s less sad for me than doing something that I’m only half-hearted about. ”
For Funas, this collaboration aligns with his own long-standing interest in storytelling.
“One of the earliest projects I did in graduate school was an adaptation of a Zen koan about the immortal realms. The fairy separates from her soul. There's the soul, and then there's the body. And… Which one is the real fairy? I think I've always been obsessed with the tension between body and spirit or intellect. So it's always been in the background.”