So many times in theatre, audiences find themselves looking in on moments they clearly don’t belong in. That’s theatre, there’s a voyeuristic nature to it that most people don’t seem to acknowledge. But that isn’t an option in Love’s End, the two person play written by Pascal Rambert that very clearly puts the audience in an uncomfortable position, witnessing a very personal break up between a couple who have been in a serious relationship, and...

Pascal Rambert's physically static, emotionally furious Love's End knows exactly how much it is playing with patience—its simmer, its evaporation, its sudden return. Formed from a pair of dueling, nearly hour-long monologues, Love's End drives us through irritation (“I know you're looking at your watch,” says an actor, unapologetically) to fascinated suspension and even a creepy, rubber-necking excitement. It takes patience to watch, but its...

I was warned that even though Rambert’s work is usually grounded in movement, that this particular piece might not have enough movement for me to evaluate, and indeed, it did not. The two-hour long, two-hander which consists of two monologues is delivered mostly in a deeply rooted stillness, like watching “two hard blocks of ice that melt into blood,” as one of the characters utters. Yet, as unnervingly still as the performances were, this...

Love is a many splendored thing or a four-letter word, depending on one’s current affairs of the heart. When it leaves, love is said to fade or die away, but in Pascal Rambert’s newest play, it goes out with the fire power of a .44 Magnum. A two-hander ostensibly about a couple’s painful dissolution, Clôture de l’Amour might have been molded from the best tradition of French romances (wherein lovers emote and there’s not much plot), except that...