In the darkest moments of a family tragedy, when playwright Mona Pirnot couldn’t find the strength to verbalize her feelings to her boyfriend or therapist, she tried something a little unorthodox: she typed his thoughts on his laptop and asked him to send a text message. -speech program to express them out loud.
It was a coping mechanism that also sparked a creative pivot: Pirnot’s boyfriend, now husband, Lucas Hnath, is also a playwright, with a longtime interest in sound and a more recent history of building shows around disembodied voices. His final piece, “A Simulacrum,” featured a magical reenactment of his version of a conversation with Hnath, whose voice was heard via tape recording; and her previous play, “Dana H.,” featured lip-syncing interviews with an actress in which the playwright’s mother recounted the trauma of being kidnapped.
Hnath now directs Pirnot, who wrote and is the sole actor in “I love you so much I could die”, a diaristic exploration of how she was affected by a life-altering incident that incapacitated her sister early in the pandemic. In the 65-minute show, premiering Off Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop, Pirnot sits in a ladder-back chair, facing the audience, while a Microsoft text-to-speech program reads her lines. Between narration chapters, Pirnot plays the guitar and sings the songs she wrote.
The computer’s voice is masculine, robotic and, of course, emotionless; Its cadence and the length of the pauses vary depending on how Pirnot and Hnath have punctuated the text. The show makes occasional mistakes – one running joke involves Shia LaBeouf’s pronunciation – which the artists cherish. Hearing a machine tell stories of very human pain can be strangely funny, and the audience laughs, particularly early in the series, as they adjust to the disorienting experience.
“I like the relentlessness that I can get with the (computer) voice which is quite shocking and surprising, and I find it sometimes very moving but sometimes extremely anxiety-inducing,” Pirnot said. “I actually feel like I’m capturing and sharing a little bit of what I felt.”
The production features some of Hnath’s fingerprints. Like “The Christians,” his 2015 play set in an evangelical church, “I Love You So Much I Could Die” includes snaking ropes and cables, reflecting his preference for transparent set design. The decor, designed by Mimi Lien, is extraordinary: save a folding table, a lamp from the couple’s bedroom, speakers and, in the corner, a purple can for the almost imperceptible haze effect of the show.
“It’s really not complicated,” Hnath said. “Basically, it says, ‘We’re not pretending. We are just starting to work. I was afraid it would turn into an impeccable art installation. Every time something goes wrong, I stop trusting him or ask, “What are they hiding?” »
Hnath has been experimenting with disturbing uses of audio for some time. “The Thin Place,” his 2019 play about a medium, and “Dana H.” include deeply discordant sonic moments. And in “Dana H.,” “A Simulacrum,” and now “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” there is the separation of speech from the speaker, in different ways.
“I think there’s a part of me that, deep down, is a frustrated composer. My first love was music, and I always wanted to compose music, so a lot of the way I approach playwriting is very compositional,” Hnath said. He likes “the level of control I can have over the sound qualities and the rhythm,” he added. “I can build it so it doesn’t change and that’s exactly what I mean.”
Hnath’s plays have often involved what he unabashedly calls “gimmickry” – a task for a performer that leaves little room for error, like an actress perfectly imitating the words, breaths and rhythm of a another woman. His next piece is about memorizing lines and features an older artist performing lines with a younger artist; Hnath describes it as “a nightmare to learn – someone gets the line wrong five different ways – I don’t know how you learn that.”
For “I Love You So Much I Could Die”, whose sound design is carried out by Mikhail Fiksel and Noel Nichols, Pirnot and Hnath gradually opted for the voice synthesis solution. At first, in 2020 and 2021, Pirnot wrote about his sadness simply to process his feelings. Some of them were akin to diary entries; some were almost a transcription of conversations with family members. At one point, Hnath thought that Pirnot should turn the material into memory.
When they started talking about organizing, we were still at the height of the pandemic, when in-person gatherings were complicated. They therefore carried out an advance reading, with actors, by videoconference; Pirnot and Hnath briefly discussed the possibility of his script being performed each time by a different actor reading the words coldly.
Pirnot tested the idea of speech synthesis with a short podcast monologue. And at home, she worked at a desk at the foot of their bed, which meant that sometimes, when he was sitting on the bed, she would play the material with her back to him, and this setup informed the room as it happened. as she moved towards him. their show, the Ensemble Studio Theater, in Dartmouth (in residence), and now the New York Theater Workshop, where it opens Wednesday.
Over time, the story became more focused on Pirnot’s feelings and less on her sister’s medical situation, which she does not detail in the play.
“Everything included in the series is very intentional about telling the experience of when life opens up and completely falls apart, and what you do with all those pieces and how you feel and how you continue to move forward,” she said. . “I felt like I could offer this experience without saying, ‘And by the way, here is the exact order of an extremely excruciating and relentless 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 said. “This is what I have to share. This is really what I want to express. Even though I ask myself every night: “How could I do that?” How could I share so much? “It seems less sad than doing something I only put half of myself into.”
For Hnath, this collaboration fits into his own long-standing interests in storytelling.
“One of the first projects I did in graduate school was an adaptation of the Zen koan on Sen-jo. Sen-jo separates himself from his soul – there is the soul and then there is the body. And which one is the real Sen-jo? I think I’ve been sort of obsessed with the tension between the physical and the mental or the intellectual. So that was always in the background.
